POSITIVE LEARN workshop in Finland, 01.12.2022
Finnish first focus group on POSITIVE LEARN kicked off on December 1st, 2022. The six participants (All had teaching experience 1-30years) of this workshop were invited experts and teachers who had previously been working on technostress research topics and had a lot to say about how to mitigate it at school environments. Firstly, we heard a small lecture of technostress study results from PhD student Saana Mehtälä who is defending her thesis on this topic in 2023. Mehtälä interviewed both students and teachers after the COVID-19 crisis on their technostress and ways that they used to overcome those situations.
The focus group then discussed topics of technology failures, network problems, teachers’ professional development and educational content related to this. The workshop lasted 1,5h and the time didn’t seem to be enough as there was a lot to discuss. Most participants had had experience of technostress at various situations from their powerpoints not opening to students not remembering their passwords to computer suddenly starting to update itself in the middle of teaching.
Many of the mitigation strategies included:
- Always having plan B (and Plan C)
- Turning off devices that might be causing distraction
- Restricting devices use
- Naming one student to help with the distance group in a hybrid situation (for extra credits etc.)
- More resources to plan teaching
- More resources to play with technology
- Giving teachers the technology to use at home so that they familiarise themselves with it while playing/free time use etc.
Overall, this focus group was a success for the POSITIVE LEARN project and raised important insights for our result 1 report: The Stakeholder Analysis. The focus group was held in Jyväskylä, Finland and in Finnish.