Digital Technologies in Early Education Centers. Opportunities and Concerns

Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject Pedagogy - Nursery Pedagogy, Early Childhood Education, grade: 1,3, University of Bamberg (Lehrstuhl frühkindliche Bildung und Erziehung), language: English, abstract: In my paper I want to investigate the effects of rethinking early childhood education towards the use of digital technologies in order to find out what opportunities and chances arise from this change. In addition, possible concerns and challenges will be discussed in this regard. I have structured my paper accordingly by starting with looking at the extent to which digitalization changes the required knowledge base by defining and thinking the concepts of Information Literacy and Technology Literacy together and highlighting essential skills in an interconnected world. After defining the term ICT in early childhood education, examples will be used to discuss how the implementation of digital technologies can look like regarding the work with parents, the work of the educators and the work with children. Following this, the opportunities, and chances to rethink and implement pedagogical approaches and to adapt the learning experiences to the 21st century which result from the implementation of ICT, will be discussed. After describing the opportunities, the concerns of digital resource use in day care centers will be further addressed, with a special focus on the challenges for the educator. It should be noted that it is not possible to go into the opportunities and concerns in depth, as this would go beyond the scope of this paper, but rather the aim is to contrast the basic ideas about the main potentials and limits of digital technologies in early childhood education centers and to highlight the role of the educator.