Category Archives: Media education & IT

Practice of Reading Activities in Taiwanese preschools

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Professor Hui-Hua Chen and professor Jyrki Reunamo presented the results of the Taiwan observation in Frankfurt (International Conference on Early Childhood Education and Teaching Systems). Children spend more time in different, mostly adult-led reading moments than in Finland (half an hour a day), so reading is an important part of children’s everyday life, just because of the quantity. However, the quality needs enhancements. Reading situations are used sparingly from the point of view of children’s emotions, sociality, and learning. The pedagogical possibilities of reading situations are used to little advantage. Unfortunately, children often remain passive recipients in reading situations, and the images evoked by the book are not evoked in group processes.

Chen, Hui-Hua & Reunamo, J. (2024). Comprehension and Practice of Reading Activities in Taiwanese preschools​. International conference on early childhood education and teaching systems (ICECETS-24). 8. tammikuuta 2024. Frankfurt, Germany.

Dimensions of Art Education

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The International Conference of Aesthetics Education for Young Children was held in Shih Chien University, Taipei. In his keynote presentation, Jyrki Reunamo reviewed three wonderful art education videos about visual arts, music, and drama. The videos show wonderful ways for teachers to introduce the world of arts to children. Reunamo also presented his model of art education (click the picture to enlarge it). In the model, there are four functions for art in education. The first is to express and enjoy the world of art and its heritage. The second are the created personal orientations for different art. The third function is the mastering of art (doing it right). The fourth function is a community-enriching shared creation of art. The presentation can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo8kDineJLs

Professor Chen granted to study children’s reading processes

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Professor Hui-Hua Chen from the Taiwanese Dong Hwa University Department of Early Childhood Education has been granted to join our team in Finland July-November 2023. The Taiwan ministry of science and technology has given professor Chen a grant to study children’s processes of learning to read. The pedagogical choices connected with learning to read will also be explored. Finnish and Taiwanese practices will be compared based on a large random sample conducted in Taiwan and Finland.

We have observed children’s reading sessions when the adult reads for the children and when children read books themselves. We have thousands of random observations of children’s reading processes. A comparison between two cultures gives perspective to understand the learning process not just as a personal learning task, but also as a culturally mediated production of shared understanding.

PF & dSign

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Vertti Kivi (dSign Vertti Kivi & Co) has created an interior design for a harmonious, exiting and playful kindergarten for our project. The design has a great variety of surroundings and moods inspired by Finnish forest. Especially inspiring are the adaptable (automatic, programmable, creative or manual) lighting designs, for example, sunrise, noon, sunset, moonlight and starlight. You can see world in a different light. In the end, all we ever see in this world is light.

A grant for our project

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The Finnish National Board of Education has granted our project on Progressive Feedback for 280 000 euro. The grant was clearly the largest sum funded of all applications. This funding is a major support and recognition of our project. The participating municipalities include Espoo, Hyvinkää, Hämeenlinna, Järvenpää, Kerava, Mäntsälä, Nurmijärvi, Sipoo, Turku and Vantaa. The project coordinating municipality is Kouvola. Thank you for the team for a succesful project! The funding will help us to make the best of progressive feedback. We will concentrate on accuracy, depth, topicality and feedback.

 

Pedagogical Documentation in Early Years

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Kati Rintakorpi’s and Jyrki Reunamo’s article Pedagogical documentation and its relation to everyday activities in early years has been accepted for publication in the Early Child Development and Care journal. Pedagogical documentation was related to participative, drama education, media-education and deeply processed pedagogical planning. It is remarkable that the pedagogical documentation evaluated by the team educators was positively correlated with the independently measured observation. The observers and evaluators had no knowledge and access to the other measurement data. Thus, the correlation between learning environment evaluation and observation must describe some real connections between pedagogical documentation and children’s everyday activities (we have to consider intermediate variables). For example, pedagogical documentation was positively connected with children’s increased happiness, joy and satisfaction. In these groups also children’s involvement in the activities tended to be higher. These results are among the first statistically significant results describing the connection between pedagogical documentation and children’s everyday experiences.

 

Funding for Pedagogical documentation

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katiKati Rintakorpi has received a grant from the Ebeneser-foundation (Siiri Valli’s grant) for 8000 euro for the finishing touches of her dissertation. Kati studies the benefits and challenges of pedagogical documentation in early years. Her last dissertation article is based on Orientation project data. How is pedagogical documentation connected with the everyday activities of the children? What are the connections to the learning environment? What kind of skills and tendencies does pedagogical documentation relate to? Congratulations to Kati!

IBM & Big Data

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Orientation project and IBM have been cooperating since 2009. The cooperation has been concentrated around the KidSmart heritage, see https://blogs.helsinki.fi/simulaatio/. The 10-year old tradition of providing Finnish early childhood education kindergartens and preschools KidSmart computers has now come to the end. We are happy to announce that the cooperation continues. IBM cooperation in Finnish early learning  will continue and  the flagship in 2015 will be analytics part of the Orientation 2.0′ project to understand how and why the kids do actually learn – the massive research to be done and data gatherer in four countries and with more than 100000 observations. The plan is that the IBM part of the research  – the analytics –  will be funded by IBM Impact Grant program funded by  CSR / Celia. The discussions to proceed with the project  to secure funding as part of IBM Impact Grant program have started. Descriptions of IBM analytics are introduced here.

Dong Hwa University Conference in 18th May

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The 2013 International Conference on Early Childhood Education Pro-Development and Agentive Practice in Dong Hwa University in Hualien was rich both intellectually and emotionally. Both Finnish and Taiwanese developers presented their development models based on the research results. The presenters themselves were best examples of ECEC developers who were aware of the difficulties but also saw the value of their work and presented their results with pride and respect. Thank you all who made it possible! The conference handbook can be retrieved here.