Solution
Read the interview of Nils Lagerström, Chair of the Board
What specific education challenge is this solution trying to resolve?
A country often starts digital education development with improving the learning environment of the children. In early childhood education, they often first realise that they need better learning materials. This, in turn, leads to developing pedagogy, teaching methods, working methods, and eventually implementing digital platforms such as Kindiedays. Leading visionary preschools go directly to renewing learning materials, pedagogy and implementing full-fledged digital solutions.
The early childhood education trend is underway globally. We are resolving the following challenges:
How to support children’s learning in early childhood?
How to engage parents in their child’s education and show evidence of learning?
How to provide competitive and efficient preschool services?
Where does this solution fit into a global or local (digital) educational landscape?
Kindiedays is a digital solution for the early childhood education segment, that is preschools, kindergartens and nurseries. There is increasing awareness of the importance of early education. Research in neuroscience gives evidence of how strongly and quickly a child’s brain develops in their early years. Research in how children learn shows evidence of the impact of learning through play. Many countries have renewed their education policies and curricula to reflect this. This is particularly true for India, the country with the biggest and youngest population and one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Many of these countries also look to Finland for best practices, naturally not to be copied, but adapted to local needs and culture.
Early childhood education has started to be seen as a place of education and not just as a storage space for children. The change starts with realizing this, and the will to invest in it then increases. India is the strongest here and also the fastest growing. The New Education Policy promotes early education, in years 3-8 especially, and in the same way as in Finland, through play. Therefore, Finland is a very interesting example. 2M children are today in organised kindergarten activities, and in 2030 there will be 165M children. The movement starts with the desire and awareness that early childhood education is important and needs to be renewed. Then the policy side and the curriculum become interesting, and international organisations are involved in developing these. It creates space for companies that want to get in on the movement. We have about twenty customers in India.
How does your solution work, especially for new users?
Kindiedays is a digital cloud service that provides support for the whole learning process. Kindiedays also provides a set of holistic theme-based lesson plans as well as practical workshops to develop the learning process.
It includes a playful learning process, observations with photos and notes, and automatic portfolio creation for children, and sharing them with parents in real time.
The service supports cooperation with teachers, children and parents. To start, the learning objectives of the country and kindergarten are fed into the solution in the curriculum section and these are then available on the apps. The curriculum objectives then guide the daily planning and implementation of activities with the children. Once the teacher has chosen that this Wednesday the theme is, for example, the "sea", and there is an activity to be done with children, the teacher observes what the children are doing. Teacher monitors what really happens and records his or her observations in the app purposefully and connected to the learning objectives.
There are typically a few hundred goals in the curriculum, and as the use progresses, data accumulates, which can be used to monitor how well the curriculum was implemented and achieved. In learning through play, one does not take exams or tests or do summative assessment, but the formative assessment of the authentic work of the children is observed, which is used for the development of activities.
How well-known, popular, or used is the solution in Finland? (To what do you attribute this success?)
Finland’s national core curriculum emphasises pedagogical documentation and formative assessment of learning. Kindiedays has been used by close to 20 private preschools with very positive results and also appreciation from the parents. Unfortunately, the public sector has not yet implemented pedagogical documentation in an efficient way, but largely relies on manual methods and services like email, Facebook and WhatsApp, which have never been developed to support pedagogy and children’s learning.
How safe is it to use this solution?
Kindiedays has carefully analysed, documented and defined the handling of children’s personal data. This has been shared with the customers to make it possible for them to meet their GDPR obligations. Kindiedays data is stored in Amazon Web Services in Ireland.