Adapting to Teaching in the 21st Century: Helping Teachers to Understand the Pedagogical Content in using Tablets as Learning Tools

Abstract

The world of knowledge and communication has changed after smart phones and tablets became tools available for everybody. Children are already online on their free time, but at school devices such as smart phones and tablets are not in everyday learning use. In today’s visions of the future school are strongly concentrated on the learning environments and learning methods that emphasizes the role of ICT. The visions are already here and it is possible to bring the future way of learning in to everyday schooling but the focus is on teachers ICT skills and knowledge. Teachers are in a key role in changing the way pupils learn. It is crucial to educate teachers to become experts in ICT-skills and take care of their motivation on using new technology in learning. But how do we educate teacher in this rapidly changing world of ICT? Teacher are not always able to participate in to different kind of conferences neither do they have access to new devices in every school. It is crucial to develop new strategies to reach teachers in their own comfort zone and find the ways to make it easy to adobt both new learning methods as well as new devices. In the ITC-strategy of Kokkola comprehensive school it is defined that each school should have their own ICTpedagogical support person. The pedagogy behind taking tablets as learning tools lies on cooperative and contextual learning styles. In our region we executed a project which goal was to bring the support and the device into teacher’s class and make it as easy as possible to become familiar with new device as a learning tool. That’s the reason why the structure of this project was built on tablet pedagogy, not only in learning how to use the device. The project of pedagogical ICT support person was achieved in the municipality of Central Ostrobothnia in Finland 2013-2014 and was funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture. In this article I will introduce the model of pedagogical ITC support person and the meaning of the support for teacher in taking new devices such as tablets, and in this case iPads, as a learning tool in pedagogical way in use. The project was executed as action research, where the researcher was the pedagogical and technical support person and worked in the field for 8 weeks. From the teachers involved seven participated in the enquiry of the experiences from this project. In this article I will explain the background of the pedagogical point of vue in using tablets as learning tools as well as the meaning that teachers gave to support person and for the co-operation for their own development in ICT-skills during the day they had the pedagogical ICT support person working with them in their class.