Computer and Children’s Rights

For the last two years some Ukrainian schools lucky enough to have access to the Internet taking active part in international and domestic projects.

Participation in such projects gives both schoolchildren and teachers the intellectual motivation to master information technologies as an instrument for their present and future professional activities.

Here the experience of communications using project method applied in the International Educational and Resource Network (IEARN) program is interesting. In Ukraine this job is coordinated by the Suchasna Shkola (Contemporary School) Methodological Center supported by the International Renaissance Foundation. It coordinates joint international educational programs and development of the nation’s educational network for applying modern telecommunication technologies in Ukrainian high schools. The center also provides teachers free training in new educational techniques. About 150 Ukrainian teachers in computer science, mathematics, geography, Ukrainian and other languages, literature, history, chemistry, painting, music, labor, and law have already benefited from this training. Now they are supervising student participation in various projects and creating their own. For example, Kirovohrad Collegium teacher Natalia Cherednychenko is an author of a I Have a Right to Have Rights Project, in which pupils from eleven Ukrainian schools in Kharkiv, Donetsk, Lviv, and Chernivtsi are taking part. Students are studying the correspondence between children’s rights in Ukraine as they are set forth in state documents and real life. Oleksandra Bobysheva and Valentyna Danylchenko, Kharkiv’s School No. 55 students, drew a conclusion: “We, as the project participants, must take care that children are aware of their rights and able to use them.”

Dariya Rozhyk, Busk Gymnasium (Ternopil oblast) teacher, in analyzing student work in the telecommunications projects, noted that pupils now pay more attention to working on scholarly literature, often turning to the library; the spirit of pioneering research has awakened in them.

Telecommunication projects also roused interest among scholars. Ecology education lab workers in the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences Educational Problems Institute are coordinating the I Am the Earth research project. Individual students are studying the display of global ecology problems on the local level and outline the ways to solve them. Laboratory Director Natalia Pustovit says, “Contrary to the widespread opinion that excessive infatuation with television and computers cause a drop in intellectual attainment, the experience of our laboratory working with the Suchasna Shkola Center is evidence of the effectiveness of telecommunication projects in cultivating best human traits like kindness, humaneness, and desire to learn.”