«Digitalization Destroys School Walls»: the Experience of School Digitalization in Finland

Abstract

The article discusses the history of implementation of digital technology in the educational process of the Finnish school over the past 20 years and impact of first digital textbooks. Digitality is viewed in a broad and narrow sense in Finland: in a broad sense as the most important part of the modern human ecosystem where a human is a responsible member of society, in the narrow sense as the use of digital devices for educational and pedagogical purposes for instance for both assessing processes (teacher assessment and pupil self-assessment). Project-oriented learning and interdisciplinary communication are methods witch widely used in Finnish educational system. Digitalization significantly helps in their successful implementation and allow to combine in lessons those elements: 1) pupil’s digital skills and their desire to use digital devices; 2) performance of a specific learning tasks which have for students the goal (finding relevant information), the benefit (new knowledge) and interest (multimodality); 3) a trusting relationships between students and their teachers when the students make their tasks independently, creatively. The research methods are the method of critical interpretation, case study, the method of conceptualization, the observational method. The article also provides specific examples of the use of digital technology in different lessons in both ungraded and urban schools, in lower and upper secondary schools.