Πώς οι εκπαιδευτικοί Πρωτοβάθμιας αντιμετωπίζουν τα Ψηφιακά Μαθησιακά Αντικείμενα για τις Φυσικές Επιστήμες του Φωτόδεντρου;

Abstract

Nowadays, education needs to redefine its role and adapt to the developments and challenges of our time. More and more teachers are using Digital Learning Objects (DLOs) that can support the teaching of Science and facilitate the understanding of concepts and phenomena by providing students with the opportunity to interact with them. At the same time, students can choose from a variety of DLOs the ones which best meet their learning needs. Interactive DLOs help foster critical and mathematical thinking, adopt problemsolving strategies, and construct knowledge through active learning, promoting higher-level skills. What is more, they are an incentive for teachers to overcome their potential inhibitions against technological development and adopt alternative teaching methods. However, DLOs are only tools, and the selection of the most appropriate one for each occasion is left to the judgment of well-qualified teachers.

The bibliographic research rendered numerous international references to the benefits and the dynamic status of the DLOs. However, although the educational use of ICT in general is widely discussed in the Greek bibliography, no reference is made to the attitudes of Primary Teachers towards DLOs, while the use of the Greek National Repository of DLOs, Photodendro is treated with distrust. The present paper aims at presenting and discussing the findings of an explanatory mixed methods study examining the attitudes of primary school Science teachers towards the use of Digital Learning Objects (DLOs), namely self-contained and reusable digital entities which can be employed for teaching and learning. More specifically, the following questions are investigated:

1. Which factors shape teachers' attitudes toward DLOs?

2. How are the attitudes of primary school Science teachers influenced by gender, age, educational background, teaching experience, training, school settings, grade, number of students per classroom and technological equipment?

3. Which factors lead to the willingness to use the DLOs in the Photodendro repository in Science teaching?

4. In what way is the teachers’ willingness to use the DLOs in the Photodendro repository for Science teaching influenced by gender, age, educational background, teaching experience, training, school settings, grade, number of students per classroom and technological equipment and their attitudes towards DLOs in general?

5. Which teacher attitudes towards the DLOs in the Photodendro repository compose the picture of their generalized refusal to use them? More specifically, the significant role that B-Level teacher training in ICT, as well as the classroom environment, play in the development of positive attitudes towards DLOs for Science Education is demonstrated through quantitative analysis, while qualitative analysis has been employed to explore teachers’ commonly negative attitudes towards Photodentro, that is, the Greek National Learning Object Repository. As illustrated in their responses, teachers’ refusal to use Photodendro is due to the lack of teaching time for implementing alternative teaching methods that are enriched with DLOs, as well as due to the maze-like design of the repository, which discourages inexperienced users.

In addition, teachers highlight various unsatisfactory technical characteristics of DLOs, the non-functional classification of DLOs in the repository and the incompatibility between the aims of authors and those of users. As teachers report, the factors discouraging them from employing Photodentro also include the significant lack of technical equipment at schools, which prevents them from engaging with digital teaching tools. Finally, the paper makes the case that there is an urgent need for further exploration of teachers’ attitudes towards DLOs aiming, above all, at improving the quality of the education provided at schools.