Process Documentation in Sloyd: Pilot Study of the ‘Talking Tools’ Application

Students work in sloyd [slöjd] class represents unique areas of learning. The creative, hands-on design work, as well as a mix of both individual and collaborative processes, provide options for developing multiple skills. But these multilevel learning processes are difficult to capture. This study explores how a mobile application, the Talking Tools (TT), are used for documenting students own reflections during sloyd class. The study targets what, why, and when a group of teacher students (N=11) use TT for microblogging about their work. Their subjective reflections from a questionnaire using open-ended questions are used for validating earlier analysis of their blogs created using TT. As TT is still under development, the objective of exploring students’ documentation behaviour with the application, is to understand what the added value of TT could be for capturing various areas of learning. Suggestions for teacher guidelines for implementing TT are discussed based on the findings. The article also describes the development of the application in terms of the inter-disciplinary cooperation and collaboration. The TPACK framework is used for illustrating the know-how transcendence between collaborators in the TT application development.