Engl. transl.: Attitudes of pedagogical staff towards mobile media, internet and digital games in child daycare facilities. Report of the sub-study "Mobile media and internet in childhood – Focus on daycare facilities for children"

"This report presents the first results of the sub-study "Mobile Medien und Internet im Kindesalter – Fokus Kindertageseinrichtungen" from the project "Mobile Medien in der Familie". The results refer to the initial environmental conditions in daycare centres for working with mobile and digital media as well as to the selected area of how digital media can be used in daycare facilities for the relationship between games and digital media. The focus of the sub-study "Mobile Medien und Internet im Kindesalter – Fokus Kindertageseinrichtungen" is the pedagogical staff entrusted with the education of children in child daycare facilities. In this phase of the study, pedagogical teams from 33 child daycare facilities were surveyed, as well as the respective facility managers. In addition, the facilities' concepts were analysed. Lastly, educational professionals were invited to workshops." (Schubert et al. 2018, 1-5). "This report presents selected results from the study. One focus is on the pedagogical concepts of the child daycare facilities studied. (...) Another focus looks at the attitudes adopted by the staff and management of the facilities towards the use of mobile media and the internet. Empirical results on the topic of media education in child daycare centres indicate that their implementation is shaped by the attitudes of the pedagogical staff in this regard. (...) Special attention is also paid to playing with digital objects in child daycare facilities." (Schubert et al. 2018, 5-6).

“Digital media have become indispensable for everyday organisational work in daycare facilities. Computers, laptops or tablets with various applications are used daily in all facilities in the areas of administration and everyday organisation, communication and preparation for pedagogical work. In addition to digital cameras with photo and video functions, tablets are also used occasionally for documentation and to make work easier. With a view to everyday pedagogical life and the significance of digital media, a heterogeneous picture emerges. In the majority of facilities, digital media play a minor role, mainly because other educational areas are often seen as more relevant. About one-third of the facilities integrate digital and mobile media (with varying intensity) into their pedagogical work. The attitude of the management and the pedagogical staff is important for the implementation and design of digital media and closely connected to a fundamental idea of what role these media should play in the environment. Against this background, three groups can be identified: Group (1) "We'd rather do something else", with institutions that reject digital media in everyday pedagogical work or only use them within a very narrow framework. Group (2) "Digital media create diverse learning opportunities", in which there is a cautious openness towards digital media and including their active use. Group (3) "We have to get used to it", which unites institutions in which staff hold different positions towards the inclusion of digital and mobile media. This means that some of the managers and some of the professionals are in favour of the inclusion of digital media, while the other party takes an opposing position. Digital and mobile media are addressed differently in the concepts of the facilities studied. The majority of the institutions express precise ideas about media education in their concepts. Many describe in detail how they implement their media education work. In some daycare facilities, it can even be stated that work with digital and mobile media has a high priority. In the concepts of the facilities that take digital and mobile media into account, it becomes clear that the use of these media is always linked to learning and development tasks. All in all, a balanced attitude towards these offers becomes visible; there are neither strongly negative nor clearly uncritical tendencies. No differences between the concepts of the facilities could be determined based on formal criteria. For example, the geographical location, the provider, the size of the facility or the type of facility do not play a role in the inclusion of digital media in the concepts. Three different forms of digital play can be extracted from the statements: (1) the use of entertainment and learning games, (2) the use of media toys as well as using existing toys as specific digital objects (e.g. building blocks as mobile phones) or using disused devices. While the latter is seen as valuable, the majority of all the groups have a negative attitude towards digital games and media albeit in varying degrees.” (Schubert et al. 2018, 2)