Media competence and media art: a pilot study of a Canva and Wordwall/ LearningApps workshop for teachers in Almaty

Abstract

This pilot study examined whether participation in a short, practice-oriented workshop based on Canva and Wordwall/LearningApps was associated with short-term changes in the self-assessed media competence of in-service school teachers working under Kazakhstan’s updated content of education. A one-group pretest–posttest design was used with a convenience sample of 26 teachers from eight general education schools in Almaty. Media competence was assessed with a nine-indicator self-assessment instrument developed for the workshop (four-point scale) covering cognitive, technological, methodological, and aesthetic-reflective domains; a readiness item served as a secondary measure. The overall score (percentage of the maximum possible score) increased from 16.7% before the workshop to 82.8% immediately after it (Wilcoxon z = −4.46, p < .001; d_z = 3.27, 95% CI [2.28, 4.24]), and changes in all nine indicators remained significant after Holm–Bonferroni correction. Gains were of similar size across the four domains (62.8–70.5 percentage points), although two participants changed very little. Because the design lacked a control group, relied on self-assessment, and used a small local sample, these results are interpreted as preliminary evidence of short-term change associated with workshop participation rather than as a causal effect. They suggest that accessible cloud-based tools may support rapid growth in teachers’ confidence in producing digital learning resources; whether this growth reflects demonstrated competence, including the quality of visual design, requires performance-based assessment. The study outlines a professional-development model for resource-constrained school contexts that warrants testing with controlled and longitudinal designs.