“Pause Festival Document – Layout” by Chris Wood is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

My initial strategy for my inquiry into technology and children was, admittedly, not very sophisticated. I started with becoming aware of the technological environment of my workplace and ended with whatever fell into my lap. The upside of this strategy was that it was easy and almost passive, and the downside was that I didn’t have any real focus. Case in point: the webinar I viewed at Early Childhood Investigations called What the Research Says About Documentation Systems & Outcome for Families, Teachers & Children, by M.E. Picher, Ph.D.. As it related to technology use in an ECE classroom, I thought it would be a good way to get my feet wet, so to speak, and possibly to refine my inquiry.

Picher conducted original research on the use of Digital Documentation Technology (DDT) in Ontario kindergarten classrooms for her Ph.D. studies at the University of Toronto. Specifically, she looked at what the impact of teachers’ use of Storypark® was on the home-school connection. She was particularly interested in family engagement in children’s learning as this has been shown to be a marker of an “excellent” ECE setting (EPEY Project, 2002) and allows for crossover between the school and home environments. She cited the Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (EPPE) Project (1999) when she reported that the home learning environment is twice as significant in influencing cognitive and social development than the preschool environment and was the most powerful influence on self-regulation. In the early interviews with parents, she discovered that they did not feel connected to their children’s educators, nor did they have much understanding of their children’s learning at school. The unstated objective seemed to be that by connecting families and educators through DDT, family engagement and understanding would increase, and this would influence the home learning environment in some way to ostensibly enhance social and cognitive development and self-regulation among students.

Using a qualitative research design, Picher collected data through interviews, classroom observations, document review, and through the Storypark® platform itself. She found that the use of Storypark® had a positive impact on the following key aspects of the home-school connection:

  • Educator-parent communication
  • The educator-parent relationship
  • Parents’ understanding of their children’s classroom learning
  • Educators’ and parents’ understanding of the (new at the time) Kindergarten Program Curriculum
  • Parent-child conversations about children’s learning
  • Student learning
  • Parents’ engagement in their children’s learning

While engaging with the webinar, I reflected on how all this may pertain to my teaching situation. I work with infants, but there are lots of DDTs out there and I could find one that meets my particular program needs. As it stands, my program uses a hodgepodge system of documentation and parent communication including email, text messaging, Instagram®, hand-written daily reports, and formal learning stories, among others. Picher did talk about privacy and security, which are particular concerns of mine (as well as many parents’), and obviously social media like Instagram® is neither private nor secure. DDTs seem to address some of those concerns but in order to satisfy myself on the topic, I would have to do more research.

In my last post I expressed reservations about this webinar as it was sponsored by Storypark® and I had concerns about bias. However, this study was interventionist in design. The aim was to improve the home-school connection and the Storypark® platform was used as the tool to do so. The study itself assessed the effectiveness of the intervention, and found it be a useful tool in the specific circumstances it was tested in. Understanding the design of the research alleviated my concerns somewhat about bias.

Am I going to advocate for the use of digital documentation technologies at my centre? I’m not sure. They do seem to engender the kind of parent engagement that we want, but there are other factors to consider. Cost being among the first that come to mind. As a non-profit centre in a province with capped parent-fees, we rely heavily on our annual operating grant. Budgeting the smooth operation of any centre is an art, and with funding for childcare remaining stagnant for the last 2 ½ years, there is very little room to add new and ongoing expenses. In a perfect world it wouldn’t all come down to money, would it?