A Survey of Tools Used for School-Home Communication
179 responses were gathered from the survey presented to early childhood educators about the tools used for school-home communication.
The list of tools collected from the survey responses revealed a focus on Parenting, Communicating and (formal) Learning at Home. There is, evidently, from the size of this list, a broad set of tools for this purpose, digital and analog, and there seems to be a positive evaluation of them by educators – particularly of the most novel digital ones specifically designed for the early education settings. But, despite this large offer of specific communication tools for education and their credited value, much of the communication seems to still have been happening through general purpose communication tools, such as social media, e-mail and texting. The distribution of these tools use between the pre-pandemic, pandemic, and predicted post- pandemic periods was not yet fully processed but did not clearly evidence any trend, with educators revealing their use of most of the tools before the pandemic period – although expectedly with different extents between these periods. The satisfaction evidenced in the results of the survey, regarding these tools adequacy for tracking informal learning and identifying and recommending activities based on each child’s resources, seems to contradict the literature view and the comments gathered from educators about the state of the art of educational technology and needs of further development. It is considered that the educators generalized unfamiliarity with digital innovation opportunities, particularly among the demography most prevalent in this study, and the (online) context of this survey, might have skewed the level of satisfaction revealed. The complementing of this study with proximity qualitative research on current and desired functionality for informal-learning-centered school-home communication tools is considered necessary and is set as a next step for this research.
| Category | Tools |
|---|---|
| Videoconference | Facebook Messenger, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Skype, WhatsApp, Zoom |
| Digital Collaboration/Sharing Platforms | Animoto, Canva, Google Drive/Docs, Mural, Padlet, Scratch Junior, Storyjumper |
| Paper Reports/Worksheets | ‘Caderneta Escolar’, ‘Caderno de Comunicação’, Evaluation Sheets, Information Sheets, Observation Sheets, Partner Projects, School Journal |
| Social Networks | Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp |
| Custom Websites/Blogs | Blogger |
| Category | Tools |
|---|---|
| e-Learning Platforms | ChildDiary, ClassDojo, E-Caderneta, E-Social, Edmodo, Educabiz, Escola Virtual, Google Classroom |
| Digital Game/Quiz Platforms | JigsawPlanet, Wordwall, Kahoot, Quizizz, Google Forms |
| Individual/Collective Meetings in School | Formal Meetings, Informal Meetings, Department Meetings, Year Start Meetings, Year Closure Meetings |
| Remote One-on-One | E-mail, Messaging (Apps and SMS), Phone Calling |
I feel the family/school relationship/communication is fundamental, but given the challenges posed by the rhythms of life and the level of occupation of those involved in the educational process, there is a need to find alternative ways to communicate that save us time, energy but are coherent, assertive and correspond to the real needs of the children/students. Distance communication is an area in which I need to invest.
38 years of service, evaluated current tools at disposal with 5/5.
Undoubtedly, digital tools are excellent, it’s a pity that not all parents join. To give an example, when I send a message, or information by email, 50% of parents are not aware. You have to warn them through the notebook that they should check the email regularly, but it quickly happens again.
36 years of service, evaluated current tools at disposal with 5/5.
I see little adherence/collaboration of most families due to the difficulties of working hours and especially the lack of digital resources per capita. I believe that in a short time the school moved and radically transformed its pedagogical practices in order to involve families and children in the teaching/learning process. Currently, the use and recourse to digital media that are implemented in the pedagogical action of the educator is indisputable, making learning more appealing, motivating, capable of arousing/awakening curiosity and the discovery of learning in the student.
36 years of service, evaluated current tools at disposal with 3/5.
A survey paper was written. The full results are to be published in the Results section of this website in a near future.
Media Lab/Technology
A low-fi interactive prototype of the object of this doctoral work was developed, using Adobe XD. It considered four user roles – Caregiver, Child, Teacher and Activities Provider. Introduces the idea of an Activities Bucket to be populated and sorted collaboratively by teachers, caregivers and third-party providers, and the actions of suggesting (by teachers, caregivers and children), picking (by children), promising and completing (by caregivers) of activities. The game and narrative elements are suggested to live within the profiles of children, which would be accessible through any caregiver login.
This is a first iteration of this prototype, intended to leverage the initial co-design discussions with the educative community, in any way considered definitive.
Interaction Design and Children Conference 2022
The participation in the Doctoral Consortium of the Interaction Design and Children conference of ACM-SIGCHI has been an opportunity to learn from reference work of colleague PhD candidates, more advanced in their studies, and to get input from expert scholars in the field of Children-Computer Interaction, namely Juan Pablo Hourcade, Janet Read, Panos Markopoulos, Maitê Gil and Maria Roussou – with whom a Slack channel has been opened for later contacts. The attendance of the conference extended this value by casting light onto the spectrum of work being developed in this field and providing a better understanding of the maturity necessary for publishing in high-tier conferences as this one.
CriA.On Science Communication Platform
After the approval of the prototype, this was implemented using WordPress – a requirement to facilitate the input of content by the editorial team. A basic WordPress theme was use, which had to be fully customised to address the prototyped design and functionality. This demanded not only the adjustment of stylesheets but also a deep dive into the WordPress backend. A very faithful implementation of the (desktop screen) prototype was achieved. Although the several elements were designed to be responsive to different screen sizes, a careful adjustment of a mobile version of this platform was set as a following objective.
Carnegie Mellon Portugal Scholarship
This doctoral work was granted a scholarship of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Affiliated Ph.D. Programs, which offers financial support to the researcher for up to 4 years and a chance to visit the Carnegie Mellon University for up to 1 year. This is an opportunity to work closely with the research group of the CMU supervisor of this work, Geoff Kaufman, on the game and narrative components of the proposed platform.
Courses’ Grades
- Media Lab: 19/20
- Media Technology: 19/20
- Research Seminar in Communication Sciences (Cristina Ponte tutored work): 19/20
- Ana Figueiras tutored work: 18/20
