ICT in the Curriculum of an Early Childhood Education University Department
Jim Prentzas · International Journal of Information and Computer Science · 2016
Early childhood teachers as teachers in all levels of education use software for productive, learning, teaching and management tasks. The curriculum of university departments educating early childhood teachers includes courses providing background to ICT as well as to its integration in education. This paper first outlines the role of free open-source software and cloud computing in education and main categories of software useful to early childhood teachers. Furthermore, an outline of ICT curriculum in a university department of early childhood education is discussed. Lab activities are based on a combination of free open-source software and visual programming environments available from higher education institutes at no cost. Planning of activities took into consideration students’ previous knowledge, available hardware and learning goals. Feedback from students and their responses to questionnaires are promising. To the best of the author’s knowledge, such issues involving the education of pre-service teachers have not been thoroughly discussed till now.