Abstract
Internet and its services have become inherent element of the lives of young people.
Nevertheless, we observe that educational potential, which the Internet offers for supporting learn-
ing processes, is acknowledged and exploited only partially. On that account, for several years we
have been involved in developing investigative on-line activities, highly popular interactive events
among students of the Slovak schools. In this way, as a value-added benefit, we have created unique
opportunity for us to study how students behave when solving problems in the technology enhanced
learning situations, how they communicate and cooperate in the teams, which competencies they
cultivate. For such educational research, we have made use of the thoroughly projected combina-
tion of the intervention design and qualitative non-participant unstructured observations – within
the framework of the design-based research methodology.
In this paper we present our initial assumptions and inspirations, methods of our research work
and major observations, we clarify what investigative on-line activities are and how we have col-
lected and analyzed data obtained by observing students while solving the investigative tasks. In our
research we have focused on the development of three classes of competencies, namely digital com-
petencies (i.e., those that pertain to the area of general digital literacy), computational competencies
(i.e., those that correspond to the goals of informatics in education) and social competencies (i.e.,
those that allow students to communicate, cooperate, create or evaluate their own doings, learning
etc.). In our paper we present corresponding observations and also attitudes and reactions of the
teachers – who have been involved merely as supervisors, not as members of the teams. We also
summarise potential contribution of our investigative on-line activities to education in the modern
society.
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