In November 1989 our family were living in Hawaii when the Berlin Wall came down and the cold war in Europe began to thaw. I had just been accepted to be part of a Leadership Training School (aka course) at the University of the Nations starting in Jan 1990. As the school start date got coser we heard we might be getting two students from a country emerging from the influence of Communism and soon to be completely independent. When we were told these students were from Estonia .. I confess I had to look it up to find out where exactly it was.

To everyone’s surprise they made it half way around the world and were part of the 3 month school. Thus begun are relationship with these wonderful people ad country. In January 1994 we had the opportunity to visit Tallinn and spend 3 days immersed in a culture that never was communist. I can remember that it was more Scandinavian than I ever imagined. We have unforgettable memories of our time in Estonia, still have friends there and would dearly love to return one day.

So you can imagine how happy we were when Maia contacted us and offered to help translate the Padagogy Wheel Estonian V5. But wait there’s more. We also ask our language champions to blog about it and promote Action Research in their culture. So when Maia told us about her Masters Degree we were thrilled. The scope of her masters thesis and the results of her research will provide strong pedagogical evidence for using technology in education to provide transformative teaching and learning. Please take time to read Maia’s Résumé.

This work is a design study that adapts the Padagogy Wheel of the tablet and mobile phone applications made by Allan Carrington for to the schools in Estonia. In order to achieve the goals of this work, the following methods were chosen: the translation of the Padagogy wheel  into the Estonian language, the adaptation of the Padagogy Wheel for the usage in Estonian schools and participative observations in which the initial testing of Padagogy Wheel was carried out by school teachers.

In order to give a better picture of the model based on the design study, as part of a theoretical  analysis, modern pedagogical trends have been presented, such as the BYOD approach, the changed learning approach, the skills of the 21st century, revised Bloom Taxonomy and the SAMR model. In the end, a synthesised approach by the Carrington Padagogy Wheel, which is based on a design study will be presented for the planning and conducting of the study process.

The total scope of the translation work for the Padagogy Wheel is 1 800 words installed as 19 pages long tables and distributed into four parts: the contents of the Padagogy Wheels, the contents of the Padagogy Wheel poster, the contents of the blog posts, the selection criteria for applications.

To adjust applications for the usage in Estonian schools, there has been a review of 376 applications in the Russian language versions of the Padagogy Wheel.

During the application adjustment process it was discovered that 100 applications had to be changed, 60% of which are applications which are  paid applications and 36% of which are not available in Estonian AppStore or Google Play Market, 4% of applications that needs to be changed were wrong applications, for example, Apple application on Android version and vice versa.

During the  participative observation  5 teachers were asked to plan their lessons using the Padagogy Wheel, in order to obtain a better overview of how the Padagogy Wheel  helps the teachers, how convenient it is to plan and design the study. In a conclusion, it may be stated that the purpose of this observation was the primary testing of the Padagogy Wheel by teachers.

In the chapter describing the results of the design research, a detailed list of the applications, that need to be changed will be found together with the substitutional applications, while choosing the applications the Carrington  applications’ selection criteria has been taken into consideration as well as two rules formulated within the framework of the design study.

This design study provides a set of 5 illustrations and 13 tables, which will help understand the context of this work, illustrate and generalise certain results.

This design research has practical benefits, namely it can help teachers to plan the lessons on the basis of action verbs and the learning activities of the Bloom Revised Taxonomy. During the preparation of the design research, the author has encountered and researched a variety of mobile applications, the Android as well as the Apple, which will facilitate the work of the educational technologist at school.

The perspective of this work in future is that students can deeply reasearch the use of this model on different school stages or higher education and the impact of its use on cognitive results of students. At the same time, Carrington has produced similar to the Padagogy Wheel  model aimed at the development and involvement with special needs in education, which also requires to be translated into Estonian language and tested under Estonian circumstances.