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Technologies in Teaching Young Learners

I am an Early Years Educator and I teach 4-5 years old children. In this post I would like to talk about the technologies I use in Teaching Young learners. One of the most used technology in my class is Interactive whiteboard, where I use different programs, ppts, online games to introduce new letters, numbers and other new themes. Children enjoy tracing on the board, playing interactive online games and drawing. 

We also have programmable toys such as bee bots. this robot is in a form of a bee and teaches children forms and colours. The usage is very simple, it has several buttons on displayed with arrows forward, back, left and right.




I also use Ipad to take photos for our Class Story posts on Class Dojo everyday. Class dojo is one of the best apps to connect Primary parents, students and teachers which is used worldwide. I keep updating parents with what kind of learning is going on in the class and what are the children busy with. Class dojo is also one of the best ways to communicate with parents through messages. Teacher can send individual messages or photos to a parent and vice versa.  Class Dojo also has a behavioral approach to learning, because students can earn points and it motivates them to learn and behave appropriately at school. Based on my experience in using technologies in Teaching and learning, I would suggest to any Primary teacher to use Class Dojo to communicate and update families about learning  in the class. It is easy for parents as well, they will not be asking many questions from the teacher because they know what is happening and what is their child is learning at school. Another best side of this app is texts can be translated into more than 25 languages.

The only caution I can mention about this app is you need to be careful when choosing photos for the Class posts, some parents are more paying attention to the background of the photo or how clean the class is instead of learning process itself.  

There is another app we use for our Ongoing Assessments called Tapestry. I take photos of children when they are engaged in different activities and choose the right learning objective. At the end it creates a learning journal for each child.  


To keep whole school students information, attendance, reports our school uses Alma system.

Please share in comments what are other useful technologies can be used in Early Years learning.


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Comments

  1. Good part of the day Dilfuza, it is obvious from the post that you do more than teaching. How do you keep up with the teaching process and taking photos and uploading them? Do you have any teaching assistant who might be a great help for administration part?

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, I have a Teaching Assistant who helps me with photos.

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  2. Dear Dilfuza, it's impressive how you can maintain all class processes and findng technology for optimizing them. I wonder how ClassDojo can give points to children or do you do it manually for a particular task?

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    Replies
    1. At the end of session, I open Class Dojo app on the Interactive whiteboard screen, so everyone can see and give them points for particular task. For example, Sara did well in counting activity today, so plus one point for Sara in Maths. Then we see how many points she had and how many she has now after adding.

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