Educational digital skills

Educational digital skills are essential in our time for both teachers and students and thus promote flexible, distance, interactive education and much more.

If you are a homeschooler parent, it is possible that the pandemic had not affected your educational rhythm with your children as drastically as it did with school children, however, the changes that occurred as a result of it are the ideal opportunity to promote digital skills pdf

In this article we will mention the educational digital skills that must be developed by both homeschooler parents – teachers and homeschooler children – students and, in general, current and future professionals.

What is a digital competence?

A digital competence is an ability or skill for the critical and safe use of information technologies (ICT) at work, in study, in leisure and communication.

Digital competence is not just a skill but a set of skills that promote teamwork, critical thinking, self-directed work, communication and creativity.

Why are digital skills important?

Digital skills are not only important but necessary at this time. The importance is due to the fact that digital skills:

• They allow us to act correctly and interact safely in the digital world to avoid falling into the traps and dangers that the digital world and social networks represent
• enable us to take better advantage of information technologies
• They allow us to better manage applications and networks and digital devices to access information and communication

Now that you know why digital skills are important, you must prepare for it and be up to these challenges that the digital world represents.

What are the 5 most important digital skills?

To be digitally competent, teachers, students, professionals and anyone in general must develop a series of skills and abilities organized around five fronts:

Information and information literacy

This area includes the identification, location, retrieval, storage, organization and analysis of digital information, to assess its purpose and relevance.

Communication and collaboration

This front includes communication in digital environments, sharing resources online, connecting and collaborating with other people through digital tools, participating in networks and communities, and having a better intercultural awareness.

Digital content creation

Through digital creativity it is possible to create and edit content (texts, images, videos, presentations) that are pleasing to the audience to whom it is addressed and that allow the development of various objectives in those who consult them.

Web writing or web content writing is super important to capture the information in a coherent, clear, understandable way, with good spelling and in an entertaining way to achieve the objectives that are proposed.

Security

This digital competence refers to the protection of data, electronic devices, the integrity of people and the conscious use of the digital system in general.

This front is super wide and quite delicate. A child or adolescent who surfs the Internet without control and without supervision will be very exposed to finding:

• information inappropriate for their age
• to download files that contain viruses and can steal and damage your information
• or to be targeted by unscrupulous people who seek to take advantage of them

Our job as parents is to supervise and control what our children search for and see on the internet to protect them from the above and many more dangers to which they are exposed.

Problem resolution

This area includes:

• making decisions to select the right tools for the purpose or purpose of learning
• the resolution of technical or conceptual problems through digital means
• creative use of technology
• among others

The five fronts that we discussed above are examples of digital skills that both children and adults must develop if we want to make the most of the information and digital resources that the Internet offers us.

Practices that enhance digital skills in children

Below we will describe some specific practices that we can work with children, young people and adults to enhance the five fronts of digital skills of students in general to know and enhance them:

Creativity: a digital skills

To enhance creativity in the digital field, we propose the following:

• create a personal blog
• elaborate a presentation of a particular topic in platzi for example
• develop a concept map or infographic on a particular study topic
• use a design tool like Canva to make birthday or Christmas cards
• get started with logic and programming scenarios and characters using Scratch
• Create a website or online store to sell products. At the same time, it will be a great challenge to translate for an ecommerce that will allow you to sell in places other than your country of origin.

Communication and collaboration

With the following practices, very important communication and collaboration skills can be worked on:

• send an email to another person
• create a story or account using a tool like Storybird
• Schedule a meeting with other people through a platform such as Google meet, Zoom or another.
• play a game online e.g. chess

There are many activities and practices that can be worked on to develop educational digital skills that promote a safe approach to people to the digital world.

Each activity can depend on the age of your children, and this is not only a topic for children but also one of great challenges for adults since the digital world is here to stay.

Learn and show your children how to pay for public services online or buy a book on amazon, how to make a bank transfer, how to sign a digital contract and so many other real-life cases where they can learn a lot.

We invite you to visit other sites and use your creativity to propose other types of activities to your children that will develop digital skills for future professionals.