Child friendly technologies

Along with some of my third year Primary education students I'm presenting four papers at the Plymouth e-Learning Conference later this month. One of the papers, co-written by Gareth Excell and John Edwards, is entitled: How can child-friendly technologies enhance children’s learning? I'm particularly excited by this one, because the notion of 'child friendly' technologies has not been addressed that often in the recent literature. It may even be a new term for educators to consider. Fact is, most technologies children like to use informally, are banned by most schools.

I had a conversation with a veteran secondary school teacher last night about the use of personal technologies in schools. He came to the conclusion that although devices like mobile phone could be used to great effect during lessons for texting dialogue, he and his colleagues would be very reluctant to do so, unless they had total control over what students could text and who they could text it to, during the lessons. Regardless of the reticence, child friendly technologies will come to the fore I believe, and it is important for teachers to begin discussing now, what the pedagogical potential is, and what safeguards they need to employ to make them a success.

Here's the abstract of the paper (comments are very welcome):

Technology is now a central component of the Primary teacher’s toolkit, and there has been a significant increase in the use of learning technologies in classrooms in recent years (John & Wheeler, 2008). However, several technologies have been viewed as undesirable when viewed in a formal education context. Such devices, including Nintendo game consoles (Wii and DS), mobile phones and iPod Touches can be identified as ‘child-friendly’ technologies, because they are fun and culturally relevant to children, yet they are perceived as either troublesome, or having little relevance in a formal education setting. Teachers often use technology to support their own teaching, but may often fail to see the relevance of child-friendly tools as a means to support children’s learning. Further, many schools have banned the use of such devices due to a perceived threat of misuse and abuse.

In this paper, we contend that child-friendly technologies should be considered as serious learning tools in the formal learning environment of the primary classroom. Several previous studies have established that handheld and mobile technologies have relevance in formal education to encourage collaborative and project based learning (Norris & Soloway, 2004) especially when coupled with social media (So et al, 2009). Such studies reveal that children collaborate more freely, engage more readily and enjoy learning more.

Our study initially involved identifying the range of child-friendly technologies available, and then theorising how the most popular devices might be successfully embedded into the Primary classroom. This was achieved by delivering the same lesson to two groups of children, once using the child-friendly technologies, and once using no supporting technology. We hypothesise that children will engage more with learning when they are able to access technologies they are comfortable and familiar with. We will reveal our results from this study during the presentation.

References
John, P. D. and Wheeler, S. (2008) The Digital Classroom: Harnessing the power of technology for the future of learning and teaching. London: Routledge/David Falmer.
Norris, C. and Soloway, E. (2004) Envisioning the Hand-Held Centric Classroom. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 30 (4), 281-294.
So, H-J., Seow, P. and Looi, C. K. (2009) Location matter: leveraging knowledge building with mobile devices and Web 2.0 technology. Interactive Learning Environments, 17 (4), 367-382.


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