Mellissa from Red Hill Kindergarten reflects on using digital tools within their service
We use digital tools for reflecting with children, investigating, and researching and sharing children’s work. We work with digital tools in whole group research and reflection or in small group play related investigations. We also engage regularly in analysing visual information and the information and meaning we can gain from what we can see. This occurs through observing and discussing environmental print, visual symbolism and in intentional literacy discussions around illustrations. We have also engaged regularly in reflecting with children as a pedagogical practice but in response to this project have been prompted to think deeper about how children need to be able to analyse information and think critically about the information they encounter. As a centre we have embraced an embedded approach to supporting children to evaluate information. The questions we ask and the language we use will help children develop critical reflection skills needed for a world saturated with information sources and not all credible.
An example of this is in term one we observed tadpoles in our classroom. Over many weeks we researched with the group information about tadpoles, frogs and life cycles. We used the children’s questions as a foundation for investigation. Inspired by engaging in this project we were more conscious of the language we used when we were researching with children and in provoking deep thinking about the information we were uncovering eg asking how do we know that it is true information and is that the same or different information to what we have found before.