Choosing the right ICT tools and resources

The effective planning of digital technologies into the early year’s curriculum also involves ensuring that you have the right tools for the job. As an early childhood educator it is important that you match the types of ICT resources to the intended learning objectives (Hilton, Hilton, Dole, & Campbell, 2014; Kennewell, 2004). The vast amount of these will make it challenging for you, but will also enable you to be very specific about the role these ICT resources play in learning. Therefore, maximise the opportunities in the classroom for learning to take place. It needs to be an “environment underpinned by knowledge of how children develop skills, explore and grow in understanding of key concepts” (Allen, Potter, Sharpe, & Turvey, 2012, p. 65).

Within the early childhood setting, there are three kinds of interactions with ICT that children can benefit from and include the following (Beauchamp, 2012, p. 99):

• Brief targeted moments – consists of activities that take 5-10 minutes to complete; • Spur-of-the-moment ideas – usually consisting of child initiated, spontaneous activities that can be accomplished with little prior planning and that make use of available materials; • Thematically-linked activities – carefully planned, multilayered activities that involve multiple opportunities to learn key concepts in various ways.

There are eight principles that should be followed when determining the effectiveness of ICT applications (Sung, Siraj-Blatchford, & Kucirkova, 2016; Siraj-Blatchford & Whitebread, 2003):

Principle 1

The ICT program must be educational in nature. Drill and practice programs have very narrow educational aims and should be used with caution as they promote a very directive form of teaching.

Principle 2

The best ICT applications encourage collaboration as they provide a better cognitive challenge to young children.

by integrating ICT with other activities. As stated earlier, the best way to develop child ICT capability is to provide them with meaningful activities, embedded in purposeful subject-related context. For example, “rather than teaching children how to use a database, a knowledge of database principles and processes and the skills required to enter and manipulate data, can be taught through using a database to help the children learn something useful about a subject” (Bennett, Hamill, & Pickford, 2007, p. 48).

Play is considered a leading activity and when children play with both functioning and pretending technological artefacts they serve the same purpose. The same can be said for computer applications as children interact and engage with them.

Just as important is the recognition that this is more consistent with the notion of ICT as a learning tool.

Principle 4

For child ICT capability to be developed the child must be in control and not the other way around. Integrated Learning Systems such as drill and practice software do not achieve this. Simulations and multimedia databases provide some control but it will only be the programs that give them complete control. They must be intellectually challenged with content-free software such as coding programs, word processing, painting and drawing programs, and image manipulation software. There are also databases that provide these opportunities.

The evaluate these applications Bennett (1997 as cited in Kennewell et al., 2000) provides these guidelines:

• What features and facilities does the software provide that might be used to extend the child’s learning? • How easy are these features to use? • Will the children need to be instructed in their use before or during their use of the software? • What is the educational purpose underlying the child’s use of the software?

Principle 5

It is important that ICT applications are transparent and intuitive. In other words, the application completes each clearly defined task in a single operation. For example, the ‘drag and drop’facility or saving