ICT in the Curriculum of an Early Childhood Education University Department

International Journal of Information and Computer Science (IJICS) Volume 5, 2016 doi: 10.14355/ijics.2016.05.001

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ICT in the Curriculum of an Early Childhood Education University Department Jim Prentzas Department of Education Sciences in Early Childhood, School of Education Sciences, Democritus University of Thrace, 68100 Nea Chili, Alexandroupolis, Greece dprentza@psed.duth.gr Abstract Early childhood teachers as teachers in all levels of education use software for productive, learning, teaching and management tasks. The curriculum of university departments educating early childhood teachers includes courses providing background to ICT as well as to its integration in education. This paper first outlines the role of free open-source software and cloud computing in education and main categories of software useful to early childhood teachers. Furthermore, an outline of ICT curriculum in a university department of early childhood education is discussed. Lab activities are based on a combination of free open-source software and visual programming environments available from higher education institutes at no cost.

Planning of activities took into consideration students’ previous knowledge, available hardware and learning goals. Feedback from students and their responses to questionnaires are promising. To the best of the author’s knowledge, such issues involving the education of pre-service teachers have not been thoroughly discussed till now.

Keywords ICT Education; ICT in Teacher Education; Free Open-Source Software in Higher Education; Free Open-Source Software in Teacher Education; Visual Programming Environments in Teacher Education; Computers in Education; E-learning; Educational Technology

Introduction Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is an integral part of the curriculum in all levels of education from early childhood to university education [26], [13]. Integration of ICT in education has been a subject of research during the last decades in various contexts. As ICT is a main type of educational technology, its integration in education concerns identification and selection of appropriate technological resources and methodologies that are required to handle needs of specific learners [26]. Many corresponding research projects have been implemented. Recent projects have dealt with aspects such as blended learning [9], [23], pure distance learning [19], lifelong learning and professional development [2], [19], serious games [18], sharing of educational resources [3], collaborative creation of resources [23], adaptivity to user characteristics [8], [20] and knowledge extraction from educational activities [15], among others.

An aspect that is receiving interest during the last years involves integration of ICT in early childhood education [24], [29], [30], [31]. The introduction of ICT in early childhood education was more recent compared to other levels of education. ICT competence is considered important for young children since they are digital natives, they interact with ICT tools in most aspects of everyday life [24] and learning experiences may be enhanced with ICT. Integration of ICT in early childhood education involves combination of various resources (i.e. devices and software). Features of each resource type may be exploited in activities to enhance learning, teaching and ICT competence. Computers are usually combined with other ICT devices [24], [29]. More specifically, interactive whiteboards [17], digital photo and video cameras [16], [24], programmable toys [1], [17], [24], robotic kits [12], [33], robots [6], [21] and game consoles [10], among others, are employed in early childhood education besides computers. Several software tools for early childhood have become available. The interface of software addressed to young children is multimedia-based to facilitate interaction. An important aspect in early childhood is the availability of ICT resources in classroom and at home. To this end, free open-source software (FOSS), software available from higher education institutes at no cost and cloud computing play an important role.

ICT is an important part of the curriculum of university departments concerning early childhood education.

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Students acquire ICT knowledge useful to them during their undergraduate and post-graduate studies, within their family setting, as in-service teachers, in lifelong learning settings and generally as members of an Information Society [22]. Therefore, early childhood teachers need to be competent in ICT according to different perspectives.

The curriculum of an early childhood education department needs to provide a thorough background to ICT resources educating pre-service teachers to be flexible in using the most appropriate ones to achieve learning goals.

Software that may be used by early childhood teachers in order to implement educational applications for young children is part of the curriculum. The implementation of certain types of applications requires some programming.

Teachers may exploit various visual programming environments for the implementation of educational applications. Such environments are convenient to persons such as teachers that are not experts in programming.

In this paper, issues concerning ICT in the curriculum of a university department in early childhood education are presented. Emphasis is put on ICT competence of pre-service teachers covering different aspects. ICT issues included in a curriculum always depend on prior knowledge of students acquired during their studies in previous education levels. FOSS and visual programming environments play an important role in the curriculum due to advantages offered to teachers, students and student parents. Results acquired from students’ responses to questionnaires are positive. To the best of the author’s knowledge, issues concerning exploitation of several types of FOSS and visual programming environments in the education of pre-service early childhood teachers have not been thoroughly discussed till now.

This paper is organized as follows. First, main categories of software that early childhood teachers need to be acquainted with are presented. The following section presents an outline of ICT in the curriculum of an early childhood education university department. Further on, results derived from student questionnaires are presented.

Finally, the conclusions are discussed.

Main Categories of Software Tools Useful to Early Childhood Teachers Various types of software tools may be employed by early childhood (pre-service and in-service) teachers.

Teachers employ software for different types of tasks such as learning, teaching, productive and management tasks.

Before discussing main categories of software tools, issues regarding FOSS and cloud computing are outlined since their roles in education are becoming increasingly important. The overall discussion in this section could be used as a guideline for other university departments as well.

FOSS competence for teachers and students is considered important for several reasons [32] such as the following:

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Teaching and learning is promoted with the availability of tools. Teachers have the opportunity to test alternative tools performing similar tasks and select the most appropriate ones for their courses.

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Teachers may instill the general philosophy of volunteerism and participation in collaborative communities to students and students’ parents.

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Teachers may provide useful feedback involving software used by themselves and their students.

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FOSS can be freely installed on devices used in classroom and at home, an important aspect in case of limited school and/or family budgets. Students, students’ parents and teachers may exploit the devices they have at home to further practice in software functionalities used in classroom.

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New versions of installed software are available at no cost.

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The issue of proprietary software with illegitimate licenses is dealt with.

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Software functionalities may be adapted to the needs of users in specific countries and regions.

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New tools addressed to teachers and students may be developed based on existing tools.

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Several FOSS tools have less hardware requirements compared to their proprietary alternatives. In educational units it may not be possible to frequently upgrade the available (or obtain new) hardware. This may be also the case for hardware used at home by teachers and student families.

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Several standalone FOSS tools are multi-platform. Therefore, teachers, students and students’ parents are able to run the software on operating systems they prefer.

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During the last years, the popularity of cloud computing services in education is constantly increasing [7], [27].

They may be discerned into three main types (from lower to higher level of abstraction): (a) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), (b) Platform as a Service (PaaS) and (c) Software as a Service (SaaS). IaaS provides computing resources (e.g. processing and storage) that may be used by consumers to run their own software. PaaS enables deployment of applications created using the provider’s platform. SaaS probably attracts more interests in education. It involves an infrastructure in which applications run and data are stored remotely and access to services is achieved with a Web browser [28]. Cloud computing services may provide benefits to learners, tutors and educational institutions such as the following [7], [27]: 

Many applications are available online and are accessible anywhere and anytime with any device that provides access to the Web-based infrastructure. This feature facilitates individual users as well as collaborating groups of users.

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Mobile learning is promoted. This aspect becomes increasingly important as handheld devices are gaining popularity the last years.

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Flexibility in creating rich learning environments.

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Provision of intensive computing resources that would have been unavailable or limited by the users’ own or their institution’s computing devices.

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Scalability of resources on-demand to handle varying educational requirements.

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Cost savings in hardware and software as users and institutions utilize the providers’ hardware/software.

However, risks have also been identified in cloud computing services such as the following [7], [27]: 

Security, privacy and legal issues.

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Difficulties in interoperability among services offered by different providers may lead to vendor lock-in.

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Contract terms for services provided to institutions need to be carefully studied.

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Incurred costs regarding licenses, technical integration and management as well as legal advice.

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Performance may degrade due to lacking of fast Internet connection and/or certain slow cloud functionalities.

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Provided applications may not function the same on all devices, operating systems and browsers.

Table 1 outlines main software categories useful to early childhood teachers along with corresponding tools.

Representative FOSS and software available without charge is mentioned for each category of software tools. The most popular tools are shown for each category. FOSS is shown in plain text. Proprietary software that is useful is shown within brackets. Software available without charge is shown in italics. Subcategories of tools are shown within braces. Most tasks required by teachers may be implemented with FOSS. Other tasks can be implemented with software (e.g. visual programming environments) available from higher education institutes at no cost. Most standalone software tools mentioned are multi-platform.

The proprietary e-portfolio tool Educa is specifically designed for early childhood. Furthermore, DoudouLinux, Qimo for Kids and Sugar are three typical GNU/Linux distributions addressed to young children whose user interface differs. Sugar is the desktop environment that is part of the One Laptop Per Child project and emphasizes collaborative learning. Specialized types of software may also be integrated in teaching besides the ones shown in Table 1. For instance, Geographical Information Systems could be used to teach geographical and spatial aspects.

Creation of educational applications is an important task for early childhood teachers. Educational applications addressed to young children are multimedia-based. Different types of tools may be used to implement corresponding multimedia applications. Such tools involve presentation software, e-learning authoring tools for early childhood and visual programming environments. Their main functionalities are outlined in the following.

Presentation software (such as the proprietary MS PowerPoint and the FOSS LibreOffice Impress) may be used to easily create interactive educational applications for young children. Such applications exploit custom animation effects and hyperlinks attached to objects. These features enable, among others, the creation of interactive activities

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(e.g. multiple choice exercises).

There are various Web-based and standalone e-learning authoring tools that may be exploited to easily create interactive learning content. They enable creation of more sophisticated interactive exercises and activities compared to presentation software. JClic is a convenient FOSS authoring tool for early childhood teachers.

TABLE 1 SOFTWARE USEFUL TO EARLY CHILDHOOD TEACHERS

Software category Desktop publishing Web design Image editing Audio recording and editing 2D animation creation 3D animation creation E-portfolio Learning Management Systems Concept and mind mapping tools Collaborative authoring Software for interactive whiteboards Operating systems alternative to proprietary ones Educational software for young children Operating systems addressed to young children Library book management E-learning authoring tool Visual programming environments for programmers at least 8 years old

Visual programming environments for programmers up to 8 years old

Representative software Scribus LibreOffice Writer/Web, Google Sites GIMP (raster image editor), Inkscape (vector image editor), Blender (3D modeling) Audacity Pencil, Synfig, GIMP Blender Mahara, Wiki platforms, [Educa] Moodle FreeMind, [Kidspiration] Wiki platforms, Cloud Office platforms Open SankorĂŠ GNU/Linux distributions Tux Paint, TuxMath, Tux Typing, GCompris, [Kidspiration] DoudouLinux, Qimo For Kids, Sugar Koha, OpenBiblio JClic Scratch (2D applications) Alice (3D applications) App Inventor, Catrobat (for smartphones and tablets) Enchanting (for robotic kits) {Simulators of programmable toys} ToonTalk {Tangible programming languages} ScratchJr

Visual programming environments may be used by early childhood teachers to create multimedia applications (e.g. digital stories and games) addressed to young children. In fact, these tools have been developed mainly to introduce primary and secondary education students to programming. For the same purpose, these tools have also been employed in higher education to teach Computer Science students. They may also be used to teach higher education students that are not required to be experts in programming but are required to (a certain degree) to be acquainted with programming concepts since the implementation of several types of digital applications requires programming. Programming concepts may be taught in an amusing and appealing way [11], [25], [14].

Visual programming environments have been developed in which programming instructions are in the form of visual icons or blocks. Therefore, implementation of an application does not require the typing of instructions and use of complex semantics but placement of corresponding icons or blocks in a logical sequence setting also their parameters. Two representative visual programming environments that have been employed in education the last years are Scratch and Alice. Both of them are multi-platform and may be used without charge. Scratch is being developed by MIT and enables implementation of 2D applications [25], [14]. Alice is being developed by Carnegie Mellon and enables implementation of 3D applications [4]. Corresponding concepts are part of the curriculum of primary, secondary and higher education in various countries to promote creativity and programming teaching.

Early childhood teachers may learn programming concepts with the use of visual learning environments and also implement applications addressed to their students. Visual programming environments may be used to implement applications for different types of ICT devices (e.g. desktop and laptop computers, tablets, smartphones, game consoles and robots). For instance, App Inventor [34] and Catrobat may be used to implement applications for smartphones and tablets. Enchanting may be used to program robotic kits. Enchanting and Catrobat are based on or inspired by Scratch. Tools are also developed to enable implementation of tablet applications on tablets.

The aforementioned programming environments may be used by programmers that are at least eight years old.

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There are also various types of visual programming environments that may be used by children under eight. First, there are environments that more or less act as simulators of programmable toys. These environments provide programming icons similar to the control buttons of programmable toys. Similar environments may be used to program robots to move on surfaces. Second, there are action-based programming languages such as ToonTalk. In ToonTalk, the programmer performs live actions with an avatar in a virtual world and such an approach may be applied in early childhood [16]. Third, there is work in tangible programming languages which may be used by young children to combine computer programming and tangible interaction [33]. Among others, tools have been developed to convert programs created by children with physical items (e.g. wooden blocks) to on-screen programs. Fourth, ScratchJr is a version of Scratch for early childhood [5].

ICT and Curriculum of an Early Childhood Education University Department This section outlines the ICT curriculum in an early childhood education department. Up till now, ICT courses in our country are obligatory in junior high school but elective in high school meaning that many students are not taught ICT issues in high school. Therefore, significant ICT issues are not known (or have been forgotten) by firstyear students affecting to a certain degree the department’s curriculum.

The duration of studies in our Department is four years. There are about 160 students studying in each semester. In each semester, one third of the students are male and the rest of them are female. ICT concepts are primarily taught in four undergraduate curriculum courses. Two of them are obligatory and the other two are elective. Courses consist of weekly classroom lectures and lab activities. Attendance in lab activities is obligatory. A lab project is implemented during the last weeks of the semester.

The available time for lab activities in all four semesters does not suffice to conduct activities involving all types of software discussed in the previous section. Therefore, a selection of tools used in lab activities has been made with emphasis on the project that students have to implement by the end of the semester. Certain types of tools not included in lab activities are presented in tutorials during classroom lectures. Lab activities involve tools such as the following: LibreOffice, JClic, educational software addressed to young children (i.e. Tux Paint, TuxMath, Tux Typing, GCompris, educational software freely available from the Ministry of Education), GIMP, Scribus, wikis, Audacity, Scratch and Alice. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there is no other published work discussing the implementation of all lab activities by pre-service teachers with FOSS and software available from higher education institutes at no cost.

The planning of lab activities took into consideration the following main factors: 

Students ought to become competent in ICT tools used in early childhood, to learn how to integrate ICT tools in learning activities and to implement educational applications addressed to young children. All these learning goals need to be gradually accomplished in combination.

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Students’ most familiar operating systems (i.e. various versions of MS Windows).

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A portion of students have relatively old computers at home besides the ones having new computers. This is also the case for a portion of kindergartens.

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Most of the computers used in kindergartens in our country run a version of MS Windows.

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The lack of Internet connection at home by a portion of students.

Therefore, multi-platform standalone software that could be installed on new and relatively old computers and on all recent versions of MS Windows (i.e. from XP and henceforth) was used. This enables students to practice at home and exploit computers in kindergartens. The software tools are lightweight and their system requirements are low. They could effectively run on computers with Pentium IV CPU and 2 GB RAM. The lab project in each course involves implementation of a different type of educational application addressed to young children. More specifically, the lab projects involve the following: 

Implementation of educational presentations with interactive activities (the first course),

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Implementation of an educational application with interactive activities using JClic (the second course),

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Implementation of a 2D digital story using Scratch (the third course),

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Implementation of a 3D digital story using Alice (the fourth course).

Student Questionnaire Results Students were asked to complete questionnaires regarding the ICT courses at the end of the corresponding semesters. Students completed questionnaires during the three academic years 2011-2012, 2012-13 and 2013-14.

Students were required to respond to queries mainly involving the following: (a) previous knowledge involving software tools, (b) the level of their satisfaction after completing lab activities and (c) their attitude to exploiting corresponding software tools as in-service teachers.

Most students had not used multimedia tools such as image editors, audio recording and editing and animation creators. This means that school students need to practice in certain of these issues during lab activities in school as well as at home. Certain multimedia tools are taught in elective courses in high school. The majority of students were also not accustomed with Learning Management System (LMS) functionalities although a FOSS LMS is available to school teachers and students. Results are outlined in Fig. 1. In our country, programming concepts (e.g. design of algorithms using flow charts and natural language) are mainly taught in high schools. Visual programming tools could be used in schools to introduce students to programming notions in an amusing way.

This direction seems to be underway in our country.

FIG. 1 STUDENTS’ KNOWLEDGE PRIOR TO LAB ACTIVITIES INVOLVING SPECIFIC TYPES OF SOFTWARE TOOLS

Students were asked to state their interest in using the corresponding software tools in the future. They were also asked to state their interest in generally using tools to implement digital stories and games addressed to early childhood. Furthermore, they were asked to state their interest in becoming members of a team implementing educational applications addressed to early childhood. Table 2 outlines the results based on students’ responses. A five-point Likert scale was used consisting of the following values: not interested (1), slightly interested (2), fairly interested (3), very interested (4) and extremely interested (5).

In general, students were satisfied with all tools and stated their interest in using them in the future. Taking into consideration their previous knowledge, students were satisfied with tools they had never used before. Scribus seems to be a tool for which students expressed the least interest to use in the future (compared to other tools). This is because students seem to have found products produced by other tools more amusing and exciting. Students seem to be very interested in creating educational presentations with interactive activities for young children and JClic applications. This is due to the fact that these types of educational applications can be easily created and their integration in classroom seems to be straightforward from their viewpoint. It should be mentioned that GIMP, Audacity and Scribus are among the most popular tools in GNU/Linux community. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there are no published results concerning the intention of pre-service teachers to use these three tools.

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TABLE 2 STUDENTS’ INTENTION TO EXPLOIT SOFTWARE TOOLS IN THE FUTURE

Lab Activity

Students’ intention Mean

Stdev

Implementation of educational presentations for early childhood

4.15

0.94

JClic (multimedia authoring tool for implementation of activities for young children)

4.15

1.00

GIMP (image processing, GIF animations)

3.59

1.00

Scribus (desktop publishing)

3.07

1.16

Audacity (audio recording and processing)

3.22

0.96

Scratch (visual programming environment for implementation of 2D multimedia applications)

3.15

0.99

Alice (visual programming environment for implementation of 3D multimedia applications)

3.93

1.00

Intention to generally use tools for creation of digital stories addressed to early childhood

3.83

0.84

Intention to generally use tools for creation of digital games addressed to early childhood

3.87

0.91

Intention to become member of a team implementing educational applications addressed to early childhood

3.69

1.09

Students expressed more interest in using Alice compared to Scratch. The 3D environment of Alice seems to be more appealing to students although more effort is required to position and move objects on the scene. There was also another reason for students’ preference to Alice. In Scratch, each programmable item is assigned a different section in which the corresponding instructions need to be placed. In Alice, all instructions can be given in one section and this makes development simpler to students that are not very experienced in programming.

FIG. 2 TYPES OF STORIES IMPLEMENTED BY STUDENTS USING SCRATCH AND ALICE

All students completed their projects. Some of them required more assistance compared to others. However, a common aspect among students was that they enjoyed the implementation of their project. Fig. 2 depicts the percentage of the three main types of stories implemented by students using Scratch and Alice. The scenarios of stories were figured out by students themselves. This aspect facilitated the familiarization of students with the functionality of the two tools. The following main types of stories were implemented: stories exclusively involving human characters, stories involving human and animal characters, imaginary stories exclusively involving animal characters. It should be noted that most stories were imaginary.

To simplify implementation of stories with Scratch and Alice, the following main guidelines were given to students: 

Each story consisted of three or four scenes. It is not simple to create very long stories with these two tools.

Breaking up each story into scenes simplifies debugging and subsequent alterations in instructions.

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Each scene involved at most four characters. A larger number of characters would have complicated implementation.

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Each scene involved dialogs among corresponding characters and movement in scene space.

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In stories implemented with Alice, instructions implementing each scene were organized as separate methods. Each method was called when necessary.

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The students’ attitude towards integration of computing devices in early childhood education changed after completion of courses. More specifically, their attitude gradually tended to be more positive as they became familiar with ICT issues involving early childhood. A general prerequisite of successful integration of ICT in education is the teachers’ positive attitude. Teachers with a negative or neutral attitude are not very likely to exploit ICT to the desired extent.

TABLE 3 STUDENTS’ OPINIONS REGARDING THE USEFULNESS OF ICT INTEGRATION IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

Lab Activity

Students’ opinion Mean

Stdev

Prior attending the first ICT course

3.36

0.83

After attending the first ICT course

4.12

0.68

After attending the second ICT course

4.25

0.62

Table 3 outlines the students’ evolving attitude towards integration of ICT in early childhood education as recorded in questionnaires. The results involve the two obligatory courses. A five-point Likert scale was used consisting of the following values: useless (1), slightly useful (2), fairly useful (3), very useful (4) and extremely useful (5). As students completed each one of the courses, their opinions regarding the usefulness of ICT integration in early childhood education became more positive.

Conclusions This paper discusses issues involving ICT in the curriculum of a university department educating early childhood teachers. The role of FOSS and software available from higher education institutes at no cost is important as an increasing number of corresponding tools that may be used by teachers become available. The corresponding tools are generally lightweight enabling all tasks to be performed efficiently.

Issues discussed in this paper may provide guidelines to university departments educating teachers regarding integration of ICT in their curriculum. Lab activities based on a combination of FOSS, software available at no cost from higher education institutes and cloud computing services may be planned. An important issue for pre-service teachers is to obtain a sufficient background in ICT during their school years in order to focus on advanced ICT issues during their undergraduate studies. Education policies involving ICT curriculum in all levels of education are changing around the world. ICT courses consisting of both theory and lab activities are required in all levels of education. Lab activities should also focus on implementation of applications with varying complexity.

Teachers in all levels of education ought to have an open mind regarding software and this aspect has influenced the planning of the ICT curriculum in our department. The role of teachers is always important. They need to exhibit flexibility in finding and selecting software that is mostly suitable for the required tasks and available hardware. They need to be informed regarding available software they could use and disperse relevant information to colleagues and student parents. They could become members of corresponding communities and assist in preparing relevant manuals and tutorials that become publicly available.

In the future, the ICT curriculum in our department will involve additional directions. One direction concerns implementation of 2D and 3D educational games. Another direction involves implementation of activities concerning an interactive whiteboard recently acquired by our Department. We also intend to acquaint students with lightweight GNU/Linux distributions by using some spare computers in their leisure time on campus.

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