Abstracts - Earli

attempted to examine segmentation units as well, and to examine which letters children use in theirspellings. Both experiments were concerned with the possible influence of letter names uponspellings. In both, children had to write 25 common nouns. In experiment 1, children wrote freely.In experiment 2, they were asked to use non-Latin mobile letters. Participants for both experimentswere five and six year-old Mexican kindergartners. Results show that there were a considerablenumber of syllabic writings, and more than half the children produced syllabic spellings for morethan 60% of words with two or more syllables. Monosyllabic words were often represented withtwo or three letters. Letter names seem to influence spellings in a marginal way. That is to say,children seem to produce more correct initial letters when they match the initial syllables.However, some syllabic spellings did not use any pertinent letters at all, which suggests childrenare not representing letter names, but the syllable itself.ICT contribution to improvement of skills in primary education (grades 1-4)Ilona Koreczné Kazinczi, National Textbook Publishing House, HungaryImproving the quality of education by applying ICT is one of the priorities of most Europeancountries. In the primary education, ICT is part of the compulsory curriculum in most countries.There are two main approaches, when ICT is included in core curriculum. It can be taught as aseparate subject in its own right, or used as a tool for other subjects or in some cases both.Hungary follows the mixed model. The National Core Curriculum enables schools to introduceICT in grades 1-4 as a separate subject. Introducing a new subject is always a challenge. NationalTextbook Publishing House created a new family of ICT textbook of grades 1-4 and offerssupport. Previous to introduction of the textbook family, teacher training and pilot project havebeen done. A part of the pilot project joined in the program of "Promoting Equity Though ICT inEducation" (Kárpáti, 2006). The games included in our workbooks evolved the competencieslisted below: -recognition and detection of space direction -observation skill -recollection -finemotoric control -cogitation -colour and shape recognition -direction dominance -eye and handcoordination. 26 schools 31 teachers 745 pupils were involved in the pilot project. During theselection process we focused on the diversity (infrastructure of the school, social background andschoolwork of the pupils, etc.). The efficiency of pilot courses was measured by applyingworksheets. The tests were done before and after the pilot courses. All the teachers involved theprogram reported the extreme motivation power of the application of ICT in the education ofdisadvantaged pupils. The result proves that teaching of informatics in the beginning of primaryschool improves pupils’ skills and produces a strong motivation.Designing a space for teacher interventions in a wiki learning environmentAndreas Lund, University of Oslo, InterMedia, NorwayIngvill Rasmussen, University of Oslo, InterMedia, NorwayOle Smordal, University of Oslo, InterMedia, NorwayA wiki is a collective authoring tool where anyone can contribute, edit, and delete. From previousresearch (Lund, 2006; Lund & Smõrdal, 2006) we have found that while this type of software isconducive to collective knowledge advancement, it needs to be developed in order to afford moresupport for such practices. Thus, our aim is to re-design a particular wiki (Xwiki) with suchsupporting features. There is a dual perspective in our work of merging social and technologicalsupport. Socially we develop a teacher mode in the wiki where the teacher can trace and directlysupport learners’ activities by taking part in learners’ online activities. This mode is not separatedfrom the learners’ but functions as a flexible and quick way of accessing learners’ ongoing work.Technologically we develop prompts, reminders and guides for subject specific development.– 210 –