Summary: | The purpose of this study is to examine the usage of IT technology within preschool and study how IT tools are used by preschool staff for administrative as well as pedagogical assignments. Several aspects affects the work preschool staff do with IT which concerns availability to technology, how technology is used and how technology is made available for the children. There are a number of questions linked to these aspects where some examples this study examines are which advantages, disadvantages, obstacles or other limitations that comes with introducing IT? This study also examines how, when and in what contexts IT is being used? Other questions examined are the pedagogue’s general views of IT, competence development and eventual needs of investment? Further on this study examines to some part how children interact with IT during pedagogical activities? The overall objective is to shed light on problems that preschool staff encounter in their daily work and on the basis of identifying important questions at issue that could constitute a basis for further research. The results of this study are based on both a literature review and a field study. The field study was carried out by visiting two different preschools that are equivalent both concerning the number of children, number of staff, overall technical standard, organizational and pedagogical design. The results show a number of different problems of organizational, judicial and technical nature. Organizational scarcities concerns the responsibility of handling mandatorship, assurance of internal workflow of feedback within the municipal organization, organizing the local IT development, collaboration between the local preschool level, management level who has the operational responsibility, school committee authority and up to municipal executive board with regard to IT development. Technical scarcities concerns finding solutions that assures technical support to preschool staff both to problems that demands physical support recourses on site as well as improved troubleshooting and feedback from remote support staff. Poorly adapted technique and software for educational use is a complex problem that involves a number of judicial questions. This concerns copyright, how agreements are settled, business arrangements and technical issues. All this is aiming at creating better conditions for preschool staff to work with IT and to strive for reaching set objectives.
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