Abstract:

The use of digital resources in the classroom becomes a must for educators who strive to apply most current instructional technologies and appeal to needs and interests of young generations of learners. This trend has been strengthened by the latest world events related to COVID-19 that forced many countries to reserve to distance education. While the effect of this emergency distance learning is yet to be studied and analyzed, most policy makers and practitioners seem to understand the need to update teacher-training and professional development courses and provide future and current educators, including those who work with preschool children, with skills related to distance (online, remote) teaching and learning.

One of the most important skills that might be necessary for successful distance teaching to happen is educators’ ability to select and implement digital resources created and offered in the educational market by a range of commercial vendors, private and state companies and just individual enthusiasts who design digital educational resources. This is especially true when it comes to digital tools for very young learners. Unfortunately not all educational materials offered for young children are developmentally appropriate nor do they carry much educational value. Therefore early childhood educators should have a tool that would provide them a clear guidance on selecting and using those resources that will match their educational goals and will benefit cognitive, psychological and physical development of learners.

With the aim to design an evaluation scale for selecting and implementing digital resources for young language learners, a group of researchers carried out an examination of existing evaluation tools and selected and implemented expert analysis of the open and commercial digital resources aimed at developing language skills and cultural competencies of children of 3-8 years old. We were particularly interested in resources for bi- and multilingual learners of Russian language and culture living in multicultural areas of Russia and abroad.

The study showed the lack of existing evaluating scales that might be used by early childhood educators who work with young learners of Russian language and culture. At the same time, we found that the educational market does not offer many quality digital resources aimed at this type of learners with some exceptions such as a digital online school for young Russian learners Live Fairytales (https://skazki.pushkininstitute.ru/) and a few others.

Based on the general principles of educational design and the study of Nielsen Norman Group company (https://www.nngroup.com/reports/children-on-the-web/, the research team created an evaluation scale for assessing digital resources for children of preschool and primary school age. This scale enables educators to evaluate existing digital learning resources for young language learners in terms of content (various tasks for the formation and improvement of speech activities, presence/absence of digital characters, quality of the texts, font), interactivity (animation, games, instructional recommendations for parents, feedback) and form (multimodality of presenting information). This scale will be further tested for usability and reliability in teacher-training and professional development programmes.

Keywords:

Digital resources, evaluation scale, language learning, early childhood education, teacher training.