ePLATFORMS
I currently work as an early childhood education teacher in a private daycare sector. In private early childhood education, I find it more flexible to use various applications and social media platforms in my work, exemble Facebook or Instagram. Whether it is private or municipal, daycare usually has its own application for communicating with family. We also use an application at my work and that is good tool. Social media platforms are a great way to share pictures and stories about everyday life in daycare outings and activities. Social media is an effective marketing tool of our daycare to share experiences of everyday life in daycare with future families. We also use Microsoft Teams in our daily work for meetings or training sessions
I chose five e-platforms and they are Youtube, Instagram, Blogger, Whatsupp, and Miro.
Youtube
When you are studying youtube is very good platform to search information. In my own work YouTube is the most used sosial media. There are also many different videos and short educational videos for early childhood education on YouTube. I could use YouTube for example for a parents’ evening if there were good and relevant topics for parents on YouTube. In daycare, we might watch some a music video by Kielinuppu on YouTube if we want to learn a new song with supporting signs. I don’t use YouTube anymore so much, because we use Spotify to listen music with the children.
Instagram is a free social media service and that’s why that is also a great tool to use. On Instagram, you can share pictures and short videos of everyday life in early childhood education. I think that is a good way to marketing our daycare, because families can get a peek into the daily life in daycare. We always ask families for concent before taking and sharing pictures on social media. We never take pictures of children´s faces and share them on Instagram. The downsides of my job are that it´s not possible to upload authentic real-time pictures of daily life in the daycare to Instagram and photos may be misused because they are publicly available there. And also the Instagram account could even be hacked.
Blogger
In this course I was able to crate my own blogging platform, and the creation process was easy and quick. Blogs were very popular in the past, but their popularity has waned in recent years. I myself also read many different blogs and I got ideas and tips from them. I never quite dared to create my own blog even though I dreamed of having one. In my previous workplace we used a blog as a tool somewhat similarity to how Instagram is used today. The blog was used to share updates and pictures for parents.
Whatsupp
WhatsApp is very easy and free for every user. If you are abroad WhatsApp is working for free with an internet connection. It makes communication simple, allowing you to send pictures or videos. It also enables you to reach many people at once. You can also make a video calls. I also use WhatsApp every day. At my workplace we use to communicate with parents through WhatsApp, but we had to stop using it, because WhatsApp is not secure for data protection.
Miro
The Miro platform is not familiar to me. Miro is a visual collaboration platform and that is free every user. It supports brainstorming, design and project management. The platform provides notes, diagrams and schedules. The entire team can work together at the same time. The Miro integrates with tools like Zoom and Google Drive. It also allows you to record video captures onto boards. In my work, we could use this tool for examble when we planning the activity periods for the children´s groups. This platform is reminds me of the Jamboard app which we used in one of the courses.
SUMMERY
Platforms tools are very helpful when you used correctly. They can make work easier and save work time. With these tools you can work from anywhere and anytime as they are not location dependent. Communication with clients and the the team has become easy and fast thanks to these tools.
The positive sides of social media include quick communication with family and friends. It also allows you to stay in touch with people you don’t see very often. Through social media, you can also gain a lot of information and possibly peer support from people living in similar life situations. The negative sides of social media definitely include the fact that people spend a lot of time on their phones. Time spent on social media can amount to several hours a day. This, in turn, can weaken social relationships between people and, in the worst cases, cause health issues. Health issues can be poor sleep quality, mood swings, and eye strain.
SELF EVALUATION
This task was enjoyable to complete. I got to explore various tools, some of which were already familiar to me and others completely new. Nowadays, there is a huge number of tools and applications available. Sometimes it even feels like there are too many.
In this task, I reflected on the applications we use at the workplace and whether they are safe for us to use. In particular, we no longer use WhatsApp to communicate with parents due to its data security concerns.However, I still find WhatsApp useful and i use it daily. I also continue to use YouTube at work as a tool, since it offers educational videos that are useful for children.
(Source: all images are from www.pixabay.com)