The influence of the Nearpod application on learning social geography in a grammar school in Czecha
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The influence of the Nearpod application on learning social geography in a grammar school in Czecha Tomáš Měkota 1
& Miroslav
Marada 1
Received: 3 March 2020 / Accepted: 1 May 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Digital technologies are essential for almost all human activities, so children should learn to work with them at schools. Some studies of the effect of using computers, tablets or cell phones at schools have been carried out, but in Czechia, where the research was conducted, the number of such studies is very low. We wanted to examine how tablets help pupils of the high school with learning social geography in Czech educational system. We worked with two classes of a high school in Prague. Two lessons were taught in each class, one with the Nearpod application on the tablet, the other without it. Pupils wrote pre-tests before the lesson and post-tests after it. Interviews were conducted with some of the pupils after the lesson with the tablet. Then, we worked with the results of both classes together and with the results of each class separately. We found out that pupils enjoyed the lessons with tablet, they felt more motivated and they thought, that they had learnt more with the tablet than without it. However, statistics showed us different results: the results of post-test were better when pupils had used tablet, but this finding was not valid for one of the two classes, where the difference between tablet and non-tablet lesson was not statistically significant. There were differences in pupils’ relationship to digital technologies and in level of collaboration between the classes. The level of collaboration provides a good explanation of different success of both classes. Keywords Nearpod . M-learning . Geography education . Population geography
1 Introduction Digital technologies are essential for many human activities: they are used at work and for communication, while almost everyone gets information nowadays from digital * Tomáš Měkota [email protected]
1
Department of Social Geography and Regional Development, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Opletalova 38, 110 00 Praha, Czechia
Education and Information Technologies
technologies (Norris et al. 2011). Children are used to handling these devices every day for several hours, but they often use them for just accessing social networks, playing games or taking photographs (Swayne 2017). Children also cannot distinguish truthful news and information from fake information. For this reason, the use of digital technologies in schools has been promoted recently almost all over the world: in developed countries (Cochrane 2010) and even in the developing ones (Medzini et al. 2015; Benimmas et al. 2011). If states want people to work with modern technologies effectively and safely, they need to promote their use in schools. In Czechia, where this research was carried out, there were several attempts to introduce digital technologies in education (Digitální Česko 2019), but the results ha
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