Riikka

Finland

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Participants from Finland
During year 2016-2017 the participants were 26 students on the 6th class and their teacher Katariina Stenberg in Viikki University Training School

 

The project will continue with Kata and her new students who are on their 5th class.

Viikki Teacher Training School of the University of Helsinki
 http://www.vink.helsinki.fi/index.php?del=0&id=911

Researchers

Dr Minna Ruckenstein, University of Helsinki, Department of Political and Economic Studies, Consumer Society Research Centre

Dr Katariina Stenberg, Viikki Teacher Training School of the University of Helsinki

Dr Riikka Hohti, University of Helsinki, University of Oulu

The importance of acknowledging students’ ownership

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 The padlet task and the peer circle in Kata’s class, 6th grade.

In the padlet task, the students took photos and wrote texts under the title “Me and my mobile phone”. The aim was to provide the children a space to tell about their relationship with their smartphones. Before the task, there was a phase of warming up: the children were standing in two circles and talking face-to-face in pairs exchanging questions and answers. After discussing each other for two minutes, the students moved to talk with a new peer.

The instructions of the peer circle were:

  • Show your phone to your pair and tell about it: How did you get it? Are you satisfied with it? Why did you choose that type (Samsung/Iphone etc,). What technical problems have you faced with it and so on.
  • Show your applications to your pair: what are your favorite ones and why you use them? On what purposes you use your phone?
  • Are you addicted to your phone? What happens if you are not able to use your phone? Have you been without your phone? Do you find it easy? Why or why not?

In reflecting afterwards we noticed that this phase before the actual working using padlet was important. Why? The discussion flew freely and the atmosphere was lively. The kids could talk about their favorite applications. There was a boy who presented his pizza call app with great enthusiasm! The teacher joined the discussion. They had the phones as concrete items in their hands, but their discussion spread to cover their lives broadly when talking about how they use their phones. Without this phase the padlet task could have been understood by the kids just as another school task, as now the task went on with great engagement.

 

What did we learn? Whenever touching the subject of mobile technologies, teachers need to take into account that students have their own knowledge and in many cases much broader experiences about them than we assume.

 

 

 

Beyond Technology at the AVPC conference, 17.-18.6.2017, Aalborg

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Our project was shared at the annual Association for Visual Pedagogies Conference (http://www.avpc2017.aau.dk/) in three research presentations.

The project leader Kathrin Otrel-Cass (Aalborg University, Denmark) presented with a student from Sofiendalskole, Monica Sun. The presentation was entitled: Primary school students as co-researchers. Kathrin and Monica were sharing stories about students producing video recordings to share their insights into technology use. The main idea was that videos allow students to select and identify things that are important to them.

Dorina Gnaur (Denmark) presented a paper on digital didactic designs. Here, digital media play a decisive role in connecting students accross various learning and action spaces making the learning process follow the learner. In the case of school children, this would mean connecting activities outside school with what is going on in class and taking the teaching out of the classroom, in real life. Videos are an excellent means of transporting rich data across these spaces.

 

Riikka Hohti (Finland) talked in her presentation about children and smartphones in class. She used the concept of entanglement to think about the relationality and interdependencies of children’s digital activity. She also talked about the affective dimensions of boredom, addiction and vulnerability with the help of photographs and narratives.