Evaluate the Use of Digital Stories to Develop Moral Values among Kindergarteners in Distance Education: A Mixed Method Study during COVID-19

This study aimed to reveal the extent to which digital stories are used in distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic in developing moral values among kindergarten children. The researchers have followed a mixed-method design due to its relevance to the nature of the research objectives. Two measures were used to realize the objectives of the research;quantitative data were gathered from questionnaires given to 285 randomly teachers and parents/guardians. While qualitative data were collected via a subset of 50 open-ended instructed questions. Results showed that teachers need support to reach the required level in the use of digital stories in education to assist kindergarten children to enhance their motivation to learn values as well as to attain more effective and efficient learning.

Elementary teachers' thoughts about distance education and learning 21st-century skills during covid pandemic

There was a dearth of research documenting the Arab World's educational response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, female Saudi elementary teachers' views on distance education during those unprecedented times were under-explored in the research literature. In the wake of the outbreak in Saudi Arabia, concerns have been raised about education disruption at the elementary school level and its impact on instilling and developing 21st-century skills. Conducted at a college of education in Saudi's Eastern Province, a qualitative exploratory study examined 20 Saudi postgraduate female students' written responses to a journal question concerning teaching elementary pupils online about the pandemic while 21st-century skills were being inculcated. A critical finding was that the participants expressed a sense of ample scope for personal and pedagogical transformation despite the enormity of the challenge. Suggestions for future research, pre-service, and in-service teacher training, and professional development were recommended around pedagogical adjustments for teaching elementary learners online while ensuring they still learn and develop their 21st-century skills. © 2021 The authors.

Multivocality of Saudi COVID-19 discourse in social media posts: A socio-semiotic multimodal perspective

This paper examines the discourse of COVID-19 (also known as coronavirus) in social media posts and argues that the mediated COVID-19 discourse in Saudi Arabia enacted a variety of voices and thematic discourses that cannot be fully evaluated without reference to the locality of the sociolinguistic semiotics of the speech community. It attempts to construct the various non-verbal multivocalities in written and visual COVID-19 discourse present in 24 texts obtained from Saudi social media platforms, namely WhatsApp and Twitter, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the months of February, March and April, 2020. WhatsApp and Twitter are chosen because they are considered the platforms most used by Saudis in Saudi Arabia (GlobalWebIndex, 2020a, 2020b). The study employs a socio-semiotic approach to the analysis of collected data following Kress & Van Leeuwen (1996), mediated discourse analysis (Norris & Jones, 2005;Scollon, 2001) and systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA). The analysis aims at integrating the social semiotics and multimodal approaches to better understand the dynamic Saudi discourse on COVID-19. The discourse on COVID-19 has revealed the dynamic multi-layered nature of governmental, individual and public voices pertaining to COVID-19 multi-discoursal themes, novel multimodal resources and the specific cultural semiotics of Saudi Arabia. The findings of the study revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic mediated discourse is relevant to the local speech community diglossic situation, cultural semiotics, social norms and integrated national identity. © 2020, Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. All rights reserved.