In elementary school, teaching and learning activities aim to develop, among others, students skills to acquire deeper understanding of their living environments. There are numerous opportunities for students to recognize forms, shapes, and mathematical connections in everyday situations. These everyday situations can be simulated in classrooms; however, educational technologies offer new approaches to extend classroom activities, teachers can simulate and design shapes through Augmented Reality and 3D printing within or beyond the classroom. To stimulate students everyday mathematical connections utilizing these technologies could assist in developing activities outside the classroom in urban or in natural environments. Through this approach students could utilize or enhance their mathematical and technical skills within their usual living environments. Utilising educational software such as MathCityMap, GeoGebra 3D Calculator, and other 3D modelling software we developed examples of tasks that could offer easy transitions from into outside of classrooms. In this paper, we will describe learning and teaching aims of these tasks and outline further research and development directions to broaden opportunities to develop students mathematical, design and modelling skills.
On behalf of the Ministry of Education in Luxembourg (Europe), 821 teachers -from primary school to higher education -were questioned in an online survey at the beginning of 2009 about their use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education. In this paper, we briefly present the context of the questionnaire and will then focus on its outcomes. The preliminary analysis of the results will mainly focus on the closed questions of the survey and try to answer several fundamental questions related to the availability, as well as to the current and the future usage of ICT in schools. Most of the teachers use ICT in some way in education, but printed documents remain the most popular source of information during class. The main argument listed to use ICT is the increase of students' motivation, while the major concern is the technical hardware dependency or unavailability. Also, an important number of teachers is concerned about the increased preparation time that is in most cases not rewarded. Finally, a vast majority of the teachers is willing to take part in an e-learning training program, probably because they feel unqualified or do not (yet) see the advantage of ICT for their classes.
In reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, the government of Luxembourg suspended in-school teaching and learning towards remote teaching. A survey conducted by the Ministry of Education after three weeks of confinement, showed that more than half of the parents faced difficulties when using remote teaching with their students. To tackle this new challenge, we adapted our research to the use of augmented reality, digital and physical mathematical modelling in remote mathematics education for elementary schools. The elementary school students (aged 5 to 12) created cultural artifacts (i.e., Easter egg cups) during the confinement. In this paper, we will describe mathematical modelling in remote teaching and further concentrate on parents’ perspectives, who played an essential role in assisting their children. Moreover, we will discuss different didactical principles that emerged from the task design during the study through parents’ eyes. Thus, understanding parents’ perspectives became highly important in enabling us to improve task designs and related pedagogical approaches in remote teaching. The data collected in this study included semi-structured interviews with students, parents, and teachers as well as questionnaires and field notes. We followed an exploratory stance with our data analyses, primarily utilizing grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 1990, 2014) approaches. Through the insights we gained from our findings, we aim to explain how the parents perceived teaching and learning mathematical modelling in our experiments, how they scaffolded the given tasks, and what support they required and would need in future remote teaching.
During COVID-19 confinement, we observed numerous challenges in using educational technology in early childhood Science–Technology–Engineering–Arts–Mathematics (STEAM) education in Luxembourg. Thus, we designed a conceptual framework on parent-assisted remote teaching with active uses of educational technology supported by cycles of design-based research. After a previous study utilizing computer-aided design (CAD) software and three-dimensional (3D) printing in primary education, we used our initial findings to work with 12 early childhood students (ages 4–6), together with their teachers and parents in the second remote teaching period in Luxembourg. We created a STEAM modeling task with CAD software on robots and collected data through chat responses, messageboards, and online communication channels during a 3-week period. Here, we observed new roles in the parent–child relationship while learning STEAM in remote teaching with technology, and new opportunities in using educational technology overall in early childhood education. In this article, we have described findings that are likely to influence students’ learning and parent-assisted teaching, in particular parents and students’ perceptions and motivations, together with the way in which parents provide technical knowledge and support in remote early childhood STEAM education.
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