Social Media and Professional Development
Recently I participated in a Twitter Chat with my fellow peers, my professor and other early childhood studies professionals. Under the use of one hashtag (#CLD419) there were multiple conversations surrounding the topics of early childhood and technology. The topics ranged from comparing the childhood of "digital natives", who are people born into new technology and "digital immigrants", those who did not, to how to teach Internet safety, to how to implement new technology into a learning centre.
Using this social media platform was an innovative way to reach out to other professionals around the global who are already immersed in technology education in early childhood. This provided an opportunity to a group of aspiring educators by offering an insight to how new technology education can benefit educators.
Image from Free Wix (2017)
Rather than our typical in-class lecture, our class took over the Twitter-sphere talking about the relationship between children and technology. Everyone contributed in the conversation by sharing external resources such as articles, videos, and Pinterest posts. This demonstrated how easily accessible it is to obtain a variety of information on one subject. Some parts of the Twitter chat touched on the topic of how technology can be an excellent teaching tool for early years children as long as the device is used as a tool rather than the teacher. A couple of students mentioned how our generation, who are on the bridge of being digital natives, spoke about how our childhood was before the rapid advances in new technology. I also agreed that while the new technologies we grew up with were amazing tools that today’s digital natives can still use in their learning, today’s new technologies can be over-stimulating. I believe that it is because of how much a child can do with one device at once which I think can impact their attention span. However, as we further discussed the topic of using new technology in early childhood education (ECE), we found that it has strong benefits; not only for the children but also as a professional development tool for educators.
Image from Free Wix (2017)
What I found interesting from the chat was the various stories that each student shared about their experience using new technology to adapt to their individual learning style and/or special needs. I expressed that technology is an amazing tool to offer children with special needs independence and empowers their own learning. As stated previously, Twitter can be used professionally to extract excellent resources recommended by other educators and professionals around the world. It was an exciting experience to change from the traditional classroom into a digital classroom.
