Transcript: Early Years Teaching – Royal Children’s Hospital

Sonya Nedovic, Early Childhood Educator: I am an Early Childhood educator at the Royal Children’s Hospital. I work in the education institute and I work with mainly four-year-old children, some threes, fours and some fives as well if they’re still enrolled in kindergarten when they’re not in hospital, or if they haven’t started in Prep yet. 

In my work with technology, I think it’s important to look at technology as, in terms of the way it can really enhance the learning, which is already happening, rather than as a whole separate subject area. 

We had an example of one student who was really, really interested in flowers and she also loved art, so we said, ‘okay, how can we use your interest in art to explore flowers?’ She really wanted to look at the way that flowers decay, and how she could portray that through art. 

Use of technology where it’s really, really meshed into the learning, which is happening in a practical sense, is where it can be really, really beneficial. In Early Years teaching, what technology really allows my students to do is to keep moments of learning alive. So through the use of iPads, the student can then go, we can record that learning, they can then go and show mum and dad, we can email that learning to their kindergarten teacher, in their, at the kinder that they go to when they’re not here. We can email it to their grandparents if that’s what they want. We can enhance learning, we can document learning, we can share learning.