Designing Classroom Practices for Teaching Online Inquiry : Experiences from the Field
Students face several challenges when asked to locate relevant and credible information from the internet. This article introduces three principles for designing online inquiry lessons and documents what we learned from five language arts teachers from Finland who implemented and provided feedback on a learning unit framed in those design principles. Teachers implemented a researcher-designed online inquiry unit in nine upper secondary school classrooms. The unit included four 75-minute lessons sequenced to support the location, evaluation, and synthesis of information students encountered in an online inquiry task. Teachers’ diaries revealed their impressions of the unit, problems encounte…
The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Competence of the Young
This chapter discusses the information and communication technology (ICT) competence of the young. The discussion focuses on students at lower and upper secondary school, especially young people aged 10-18. It explores how the strategic initiatives and implementation efforts of ICY have reached out to the level of young citizens. The aim is to consider their ICT competence as well as their use of ICT in school and during the leisure time. The authors also consider the significance and role of gaming, the gender differences regarding ICT skills and use, and the differences between the young and adults in their skills and use of ICT.
Digital competence across boundaries - beyond a common Nordic model of the digitalisation of K-12 schools?
This paper explores policy related to digital competence and the digitalisation of Nordic K-12 schools. Anchored in some key transnational policies on digital competence, it describes some current Nordic movements in the national policies of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The concept of boundary objects is used as an analytical lens, for understanding digital competence as a plastic and temporal concept that can be used to discuss the multi-dimensional translation of this concept in these Nordic countries. The paper ends with a discussion of the potential to view digital competence as a unifying boundary object that, with its plasticity, temporality and n-dimensionality, can show sign…
Teaching sourcing during online inquiry – adolescents with the weakest skills benefited the most
AbstractSourcing - identifying, evaluating, and using information about the sources of information - assists readers in determining what to trust when seeking information on the Internet. To survive in the post-truth era, students should be equipped with sufficient sourcing skills. This study investigated the efficacy of a teacher-led intervention aimed at fostering upper secondary school students’ (N = 365) sourcing during online inquiry. The intervention (4 × 75 min) was structured in accordance with the phases of online inquiry: locating, evaluating, synthesizing, and communicating information. During the intervention, teachers demonstrated why and how to source, and students practiced s…