I was born in early 1990 and I remember time when digitalization was just coming. Mobily phones were rare and classified like luxury items. Digitalization has developed rapidly, and I miss those times when you didn’t have to be constantly achievable. Digitalization at now days causes us feeling of hurry and social media gives us pressure of beauty ideals.
Social media play’s role also at my work as a preschool teacher. Our day care center has own Instagram account, and we post there about our children learning and our weekly greetings. I think we have some competition between other day care centers and that is a good thing. Instagram gives an opportunity to reveal what different things we do with our day care group and other day care centers’ posts give us new ideas and motivation to fulfill our work better than else.
We use also other digital tools in our work, for example information application for parents, web-based application for children presence and Ipads for kids’ learning. I have been several other day care centers and there is a huge difference, how digitalization shows in basic work at day care centers. Management plays a huge role in how much money and effort day care centers are willing to put in digital tools. Now I am working in little municipality and in next year we are getting a new web-based application that has been several years in neighborhood municipalities and those have estimate that application very low and not working. And now our community is getting that same web-based application as a new improvement, but the truth is that it is just a way to look like modern and keeping up other municipalities’ development.
I think that saving money in digital investments are not the most sensible decision to make. Web-based application that are not working right have lack of security, has impact to customer satisfaction and makes our daily work more difficult. We should estimate bigger picture when we are doing digital investments. That big picture includes all the good and bad things that digital investment brings, and those things are estimated with money and how expensive those investments are. I have worked in one day care center that has put some money to Wilma application. That application allows a fluent data transmission from early childhood to school and all child’s paper were in one place and it also allows multiprofessional work because for example special education teachers, curators and other teachers have an opportunity to read child’s papers.
All those digital tools that we are using at our work in day care are very simple and I think we could utilize more digital tools at our work. Digitalization would give new learning methods to children. It would be interesting to use digital tools in learning environment. I have seen that some day care centers use Smart Boards as chalkboards. Learning digital skills in early childhood is important because digitalization is more common at school world and even our society is built around the digitalization. Many parents think it’s a good thing to use digitalization as part of learning but there are also those parents who think it is not a good thing to use digital tools like ipads in early childhood. I think that adults should be watching what children do with digital tools, what they see at Internet and how much time they use with gaming and Internet browsing. Internet can offer opportunity to learning but can also be addictive and scary if adults are not controlling children’s Internet browsing.
The GDPR is the strongest privacy law in the world, and it is a good thing that our personal data is protected well. I think that most people don’t know what kind of information is leaking for third part and where our personal information really goes. I assume that people also don’t know all the rights that they have and how wide the Internet world can be. I am very careful what I post at Internet because I believe I can’t be sure that every information I post can be deleted if I really want so. I am not sure what kind of personal information different web pages gather when I browse them. I am sure that many spam posts is result of browsing so much pages and accepting all the cookies that allows advertising. People have rights to control their information but in real world they don’t have time or skills to do so.
Self evaluation
I learned through videos and other materials that digitalization gives lot of opportunities to develop our work field, but the management makes decisions what digital tools or applications are purchased. Digitalization can make our work easier, but it can be seen also as burden if employees don’t get time or introduction. Also employees’ attitude makes a big role when talking about learning digital skills. This task opened my mind about digitalization and gave me a lot to think about. Utilization of digitalization at my work needs more information and modern applications. It also needs good attitude of employees and sensible managing. It would be interesting to learn and read more about all those digital learning decisions that are made at day care centers.
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