Abstract:

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are becoming an important factor not only in our society but also at schools. This is the reason why some schools are trying to integrate new tools and rethinking the methodology in classroom dynamics. Despite attempts to ICT integration at the teaching-learning process, kindergarten education is still a nowadays challenge. This was our research context.
The main aim of the research was to answer the question: What is the most emphasized factor by children and teachers in a class experience supported by ICT?

First of all we design a teaching unit based on ICT integration in classroom principles, oral language theory and relationship between schools postulates. It consisted in telling a tale, which had no ending, and the pupils had to create their own. Then every participant classroom drew the invented ending to the interactive whiteboard. Finally, pupils explain the invented ending to the other school by videoconference.
The teaching unit application was made in two kindergarten schools from Catalunya (Spain).

With this process students met other pupils (videoconference is a way to share knowledge and also to contact with other schools and allows a direct contact including audio and video) and also they realize that the same tale could have different ends.

This research takes the Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) and we focused on creating the theory from the data analysis. Besides, in order to answer our initial question we set up the following objectives:
- Identify the factors most emphasized by children about an intervention supported by ICT.
- Identify the factors most emphasized by teachers about an intervention supported by ICT.
- Analyze similarities and differences of the factors emphasized by students and teachers.

When we finished the intervention we proceed with the data collection. We used draws created by children, children focus group and teachers’ interviews as the main instruments.

When intervention was over, we gave a paper to the students and we asked them to draw “the thing that they liked the most” about the teaching unit application (46 draws altogether). Secondly, we organized 5 focus-group in one school and 4 in the other to discuss about which was the most emphasized factor; we used the draws created by children and we asked them some other questions related to the class experience. Finally we met with teachers to carry out an open interview to know which was their most emphasized factor.

Data analysis showed that children and teachers do not emphasize the same in a class experience supported by ICT. There is a parallelism between this research results and the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) by Koehler and Mishra (2010). Children focuses in the contents (the tale explained), a teacher emphasize on the methodology (the way the activity was introduced and how we related with the other school) and the other one focused on the technology used (interactive whiteboard and videoconference).

Keywords:

Integration of Information and Communication Technologies, videoconference, relation between schools, oral language.