Children and digital media

Finnish Children learn the use of digital media at a very early age. The   Child´s Early Childhood Education and Care Plan (ECEC plan) and also the Curriculum for Pre-Primary Education include the theme of media education. In today´s developing world is very important to learn to use the digital possibilities, I believe we need them more and more all the time. Today´s children grow in the jungle of information from alla over the world, social media and all the time developing technology, our lives are surrounded by the mediaculture. The most important thing is to learn how to read and use the digital media. 

I had the chance to interview shortly an early education teacher who works in a big daycare unit in my hometown Paimio. As her professional point of view  the digital media education is a good and important part of the early education. Computers, tablets and smartboards are a normal part of their work to use for education. She thinks that in learning digital media skills the big part comes from home, for example the time used in digital media and what the children do there. The parents don´t have to be bad stalkers, but doing together and discussing openly are good things. 

As a future professionals we can find a lot of support from digital media for our studies and work. The National Audiovisual Institute offers for example researched information and free educational resources at webpages of the Mediataitokoulu (https://mediataitokoulu.fi/).  There you can find an interesting research concerning just this subject, called Kuuluu kuvaan -pilot study. Also another good source to get to know is the traditional Finnish children´s program on tv, Pikku Kakkonen, which has also developed a digital media app, Pikku Kakkosen eskari for pre-school aged children. In addition of these examples, searching from Google the digital tools for early education, you can find many different sources to grow your own knowledge. 

We have to look from education´s point of view to the future. At school the children start to use computers or tablets and some apps, for example Ville -app is supporting the learning for younger pupils. The older the children grow, the more they use digital media at school, for information search and doing homework via Teams, Word, Exel etc. When the children reach adulthood, the strong basic of digital media knowledge can be a great advantage in the job markets. We have to grow with the digital world together with the children, at home and in education.