On October 6, Svetlana Litvinova, Director of the Zelenograd Department — Institute of Business Administration, participated in the discussion platform “Digital Space for Preschool Children: present and future” at the Moscow International Education Fair.
Svetlana Litvinova, the head of a research group, presented the results of a study on digital literacy of more than 1500 educators from Moscow, the Moscow Region, Ekaterinburg, the Sverdlovsk Region, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Digital literacy is the necessary set of knowledge, abilities, and skills to ensure the quality of life in the digital world. Learning should start from this understanding of the concept. That’s why it is crucial to assess the role of an educator in the digital learning environment from the perspective of obtaining special competencies to use correctly all the sources of this environment.
The research shows that pre-school teachers of different generations recognize the importance of digital literacy in working with pre-school children, and interactive technologies and ready-made digital content are most popular among teachers. Social media and messengers are increasingly used to exchange information and experience among colleagues and communicate with students’ parents.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused the growth of interest in diverse tools for online communication in the pre-school learning environment as well as the emergence of the concept of digital content. The research revealed four types of professional deficits among pre-school teachers working in the digital environment, which were transformed into the following demands: expert evaluation of digital content, continuous development of competencies in information and communication technologies, the ability to design the learning process with the account of the abundance of digital tools, mastering new skills in content visualization, and efficient use of online communication. Based on the results of the research on digital literacy deficits, an advanced training course has been designed to enhance the digital skills of pre-school teachers.
Svetlana Litvinova shared her thoughts on the role of kindergartens in the development of digital skills in children:
Kindergartens have always been an open learning environment. Today in the modern digital world, they are becoming an open digital learning environment. This requires us to have more important competencies in organizing the space of teaching and learning activities with the use of digital tools.