What on earth is pedagogical documentation?

It’s stated in the law that early childhood education’s principal task is to support the holistic growth and development, health and wellbeing of children. This job is not easy and tools are required to reach these goals. In my opinion the most important tool is pedagogical documentation, which covers digital and hand written notes, videos and recordings. Typical documenting includes child’s educational planning, portfolio and standardized questionnaire- and assessment forms. It will only be pedagogical if the educators reflect what they have documented and change their educational approach accordingly. Like Wallin has said:

Teacher’s most important verb is not to speak but to listen.

Each child should feel that their thoughts and conclusions are taken seriously and they 

are worth of taking notes or photographs.

(Wallin 2000)

Above all, observations and their continuous documentation will help us to understand the child’s significance and position in a pedagogical context. Documenting also helps us to contemplate on the definition of a child, what that means to us and how do we view them. Through documentation we can find out: 

• what the child knows, 
• what he is able to do, 
• what interests him, 
• what he wants to learn, 
• how he approaches problems, 
• what kind of problem solving skills he has and, 
• how are his group working skills.

The beneficiary in pedagogical documentation is indeed the child. When systematic approach to documenting is part of the educational work, it will enable us to: 

• Give parents deeper understanding what early childhood education represents
• Develop our professionalism
• Increase the performance and quality of education
• Build a foundation for pedagogical planning
• Make the ordinary day visible to others who work with children

Documentation has always been considered as troublesome and time consuming activity that takes away time from focusing on the children. It’s probably true as it is still mainly done by taking photographs and hand written notes that are circulated around before they are recorded in digitalized form. To ease this workload we have developed a tool that will fasten the documentation process and the collaboration with parents. The Kidous app will:

• Help make observations quicker through speech- to- writing,
• enable you to take photos, videos and audio,
• share observations and send messages with parents,  
• automatically create sociograms and
• store them all in one place 

The features will help you do your work better and in a more efficient way. It will also provide you with real-time communication between your fellow educators as well as the children’s parents, globally. Worth a shot!