Second Post

Digital technology has changed the learning environment in a childcare in many ways. The new technologies being incorporated in the curriculum can create biases amongst educators, students, parents and peers. There can be positive and negative outcomes as to what these changes have done to the learning environments in the childcare setting. Studies have shown that there is a higher rate of positive outcomes than negative. The one negative outcome as to what these changes have done to the learning environment was found on Matthew Lynch’s article. Lynch goes into detail on some of the negative aspects of the changes digital technology has made in the education system. The costs of these devices would be one of the downgrading factors, “The cost of the tablets themselves, along with maintenance costs, higher bandwidth and security features, and more manpower in school IT departments, are certainly obstacles.” (Lynchs, 2016) This was one of the only resources I found that genuinely had an effective negative outcome on digital technology. The financial strain that the technology can come with can create a barrier for those who are unable to afford such an expensive budget. Digital technology has many positive effects within the learning environment of a child. Personally, I believe that the positives highly outweigh the one negative outcome listed above. Digital technology is and can be used to help those children with disabilities, this type of technology “can be used to effectively support students as they manage their daily activities and independently complete tasks in classroom and mainstream environments.” (Ferdig, Pytash, Kosko, Gandolfi & Mathews, 2016,p.8) The researchers in this article concluded that the social, cognitive, and literature skills of a child suffering with an kind of disability was positively affected with a type of digital technology, and the 70 percent of those who were hardly ever introduced to these types of technology were lacking in some sort of skill. Another positive change digital technology has done for our learning environment would be the technology being used as a social tool. Caryln Bracken conducted a study consisting of her observing her preschool students interacting and using technology in the classroom. Bracken had found that integrating the classroom with digital technology was “open ended and encourages children to interact with one other, and also allows children to learn in a way that makes the most sense to them” ( Bracken, 2015, p.12) The changes made in the learning environment have created countless positive outcomes for the children involved, and a few negative conclusions as well.

​(Speech & Language Therapy, 2017) [Image]