Exploring Digital Technology In Education

Understanding Digital Technologies and Young Children explores the possibilities digital technology brings to enhance the learning and developmental needs of young children. Globally, the role of technology is an increasingly important part of everyday life. In many early childhood education frameworks and curricula around the world, there is an expectation that children are developing skills to become effective communicators and are using digital technology to investigate their ideas and represent their thinking. This means that educators throughout the world are expected to actively enhance children’s learning in ways that provide learning experiences with technology that are balanced and purposeful to allow the transformation of traditional authentic learning experiences. Digital technologies can be used to explore, manipulate, discover, play and interact with real and imaginative worlds to allow active meaning making. With a wide range of expert contributors, this book provides a comprehensive examination of the current research on technology and young children and the importance of engagement for learning. This approach encourages the reader to rethink the possibilities and potential of digital technologies for learning in the early years, especially in the years before formal schooling when children might be attending early childhood settings. This will be a valuable reference for anyone looking for an international perspective on digital technology and young children, and is particularly aimed at current and future teachers.

This book explores the underlying assumptions, beliefs, and values of prevailing theories, frameworks, models, and principles in digital technology education through the metaphysical lenses of ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology. By proposing meta-connective pedagogy that reflects the ecological, transformative nature of the digitally networked world, Dreamson repositions learners in the networked world for their authentic engagement. Covering key domains of digital technology education, this volume explores topics such as meta-connective learning; digital identity formation; emergent communities and co-laboured learning; interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge production; teacher attitudes towards the relationship between learning and technology; learner engagement and online interaction; transformative digital literacy; meta-analysis of technology integration frameworks; methodology for authentic digital engagement; and meta-connective ethics. Critical Understandings of Digital Technology in Education is the perfect resource for in-service and preservice teachers, as well as researchers and specialist teachers in technology and information and communication technology education fields who are looking to enhance their pedagogical understandings of digital technology.

The field of digital technology in education has long been under-theorised. This book will enable the reader to reflect on the use of theory when explaining technology use and set out ways in which we can theorise better. It explores the concept of theory and looks at how teaching, learning and technology itself have been theorised. With relatable international case studies, it shows how theories underpin optimistic and pessimistic accounts of technology in education. This innovative book will help readers to understand more deeply the use of digital technology in education, as well as the idea of theory and how to develop a distinctly educational approach to theorising.

Recent advancements in technology have led to significant improvements and developments within learning environments. When utilized properly, these innovations can serve as a valuable resource for educators and students. Exploring the New Era of Technology-Infused Education is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on the implementation of emerging technologies in contemporary classroom settings. Highlighting theoretical foundations, empirical case studies, and curriculum development strategies, this book is ideally designed for researchers, practitioners, educators, and academics actively involved in teaching and learning environments.

Exploring Digital Technologies for Art-Based Special Education details the use of digital technologies for inclusive art education, and showcases strategies for implementing arts-oriented technologies in primary- and secondary-level special education classrooms. Readers of the book will be presented with up-to-date research on this emerging topic, including chapters on the relation between pedagogical strategies and technological tools, digital animation and inclusivity, and accessibility in the ‘flipped’ art classroom. With contributions from a range of disciplinary angles—including art education, special education, educational philosophy, and educational technology—this book will cover a variety of digital tools for teaching art to students with disabilities, as well as the theoretical underpinnings specific to this interdisciplinary area of education research.

This book explores the complexities of interacting with digital technologies in the everyday flow of practices in schools, museums, and the home. In particular, the authors pay attention to the material conditions of such practices via the exploration of media discourses on information and communication technologies in the classroom; the ongoing digitization of the school; the use of video chat for language learning; the instantiation of CrossActionSpaces in an urban science classrooms; the development of symbolic technologies such as the Carbon Footprint Calculator; the design of apps and virtual museums for learning science; the use of text message tools for collaborative learning in teacher education and the design, implementation, and evaluation of Augmented Reality apps in outdoor learning. The book is grounded in case studies presented by scholars at the workshop, “Changing Teaching and Learning Practices in Schools with Tablet-Mediated Collaborative Learning: Nordic, European and International Views” and the workshop “Emergent Practices and Material Conditions in Tablet-mediated Collaborative Learning and Teaching” both of which have been held at the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning conference (CSCL). This volume brings together inspirational and high-quality chapters that raise a range of important ideas and showcase the importance of looking beyond technology-enhanced learning. Taken together, this volume unpacks a variety of everyday situations by engaging with what is really happening with digital technologies rather than what is expected to happen with them in educational settings. The take-away message is a call for research on learning, teaching, and digital technologies that enables engagement with the materiality of educational practices and, in particular, their constitutive relationships that configure the contemporary educational practices of the digital age.

"Over the last decade, the practices by which scholarly knowledge is produced – both within and across disciplines – have been substantially influenced by the appearance of digital information resources, communication networks and technology enhanced research tools. Viewed from a methodological perspective, the rich ICT-based environment in educational settings influences research methods, ethics and the general conduct of research. Methodological Challenges When Exploring Digital Learning Spaces in Education represents a collection of work of established academics as well as emerging early career researchers all of whom focus on various methodological challenges. From numerous perspectives, the chapters in this volume deal with three particularly demanding challenges for educational research in digital learning contexts. The first challenge concerns how research manages to explore networked learning within a multi-faceted ICT environment. What kind of research designs and forms of data collection are able to grasp this complexity of multiple learning taking place within these contexts? The second challenge deals with how researchers experience the research context and interact with various actors within these settings. How to capture and understand interaction between contexts and across different dimensions of contexts in time and space? And finally, the third challenge is about exploring how children make meaning across physical places and virtual spaces. All together, these challenges are questioning the traditional research methods that we use and are familiar with. This volume is devoted to stimulating debate about the various methodological challenges facing the researcher in the digital sphere of educational research, and furthermore, exploring what kind of new methodological approaches these challenges impose. It is aimed at students, researchers and academics within education and those working with learning across disciplines and contexts interested in methodological issues. Greta Björk Gudmundsdottir lives and works in Oslo, where she is a Researcher at the Norwegian Centre for ICT in Education. Kristin Beate Vasbø also works and lives in Oslo, where she is an Associate Professor at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo. "

How might digital technology and notably smart technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI), learning analytics, robotics, and others transform education? This book explores such question. It focuses on how smart technologies currently change education in the classroom and the management of educational organisations and systems.