Digital skills education in schools has been around for a number of years already. Each school has their own approach. This article will help you to reflect on where you are as a school and what more you might want to try out in regards to the digital skills education.
Benefits of a solid digital skills program
Digital education can be implemented in various ways. A light implementation may offer few lessons of coding activities per school year. A deeper implementation sees students engaging in cross-curricular design projects. A solid digital skills program should aim at building up student competences in a sustainable manner. In this article, we discuss learning goals for a solid digital skills program and offer advice for implementation.
Learning logical thinking and problem solving
Computers need very exact instructions. Therefore, coders need to think logically and have the ability to figure out how a computer needs to be instructed to solve a problem. In essence, this means breaking a problem into small logical steps. The ability to think about problems this way can be summed up under the term “computational thinking”. This ability and skills improve when students work with code.
How to support?
Offer logical tasks or puzzles that involve sequential command execution, branching and looping.
Provide coding projects suitable to the students’ age and experience.
Understanding the technological world
Everyone needs a basic understanding of how computers work and how they affect our lives. It is required for a productive citizenship and to enhance future career prospects.
Students need to experience, experiment and apply computers and coding in various ways in their daily lives. Puzzle games no longer suffice. Students must recognize and analyse algorithms. They must apply their knowledge to create new applications. Therefore it’s recommended to study technology from multiple angles – using a cross-curricular approach.
How to support?
Provide pedagogical teacher training for developing the teacher professional skills and pedagogical approaches at your school.
Include phenomenon-based learning and hands-on projects.
Connect the coding projects with the physical world by providing projects that use automation and robotics.
Applying design thinking
The future workers will need skills in product design, service design, or participatory design. Design thinking offers creative approaches to problem solving. Students will practice being open-minded and emphatic to the ‘users’ their project outcome. They will learn not to focus on creating just one idea but several, which will help them become better problem-solvers.
How to support?
Skip clearly defined project goals and initiate student projects with design briefs.
Let projects teams engage with a real or hypothetical clients: they must design something for someone.
Building students’ creativity
Coding and digital creation is not just maths and logic. Students can create visual artworks, compose music, perform on stage, and be storytellers. The best learning results are achieved when students create something of their own. Coding provides a modern, fast and powerful way for creation.
How to support?
Engage students with creative tasks that do not focus on logic and algorithms but on the aesthetics of the outcome.
Transition to robotics to allow more varied opportunities for creativity.
Practising working-life skills
Teamwork and working on projects provides opportunities for students to practice important working-life skills. Responsibility and accountability are habits that can be developed. When students are working on their coding project, they are in fact using a wide range of other skills. They are managing their work and time, communicating, coordinating, taking different roles, making compromises and presenting results.
How to support?
Use project-based approach for learning – even when it is not about coding projects.
Allow students to define their own project goals.
Teamwork makes everyone accountable to each other. Instead of assigning roles to students, consider allowing them to self-nominate themselves to various tasks in the project.
Allow students to select their own methods of internal leadership and coordination within the projects. Help only when necessary.
Learning soft skills
Future work will continue to demand coordinated efforts of professionals from various disciplines. Future workers will benefit from appreciation of difference, empathy, and the skills for giving and receiving advice and criticism.
Students will be better prepared for the future if they are already experienced in leveraging the full potential of different personalities, evaluating their own capabilities and their peers’ performance, and optimising their ways of being and working in a team.
How to support?
Make pair work and team work an everyday practise.
Reserve time for reflection, team cohesion, argumentation, and work practice improvement.
Understanding AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to grow its role in our lives.Only some students will become AI researchers or AI trainers, but most – if not all – future workers will work with AI. Therefore it’s important to educate our students about AI, its nature and technical characteristics, its possibilities and its limitations.
How to support?
Make today’s problems and phenomena visible, explorable and understandable.
Allow students to study, experiment with, experience, discuss and reflect AI in various life domains
Keeping up the motivation
“If you’re not having fun, you’re doing something wrong”
Nothing kills curiosity faster than boredom – or a challenge that is too difficult. Keeping students curious and learning requires tasks and projects that are motivating to their age and level of understanding.
How to support?
Provide hands-on projects suitable to the age and related to their everyday lives
Allow project teams to design their own outcomes
Schedule your lessons to allow for exploration and sharing ideas
What’s needed from the school?
In order to achieve the learning objectives outlined above, schools can check and ensure the following.
- Move away from the traditional teacher-centred teaching methods.
The teaching culture needs to embrace students working in groups, having responsibility, and moving the teacher to a coaching role. Teachers could be offered pedagogical training and support to adapt a new teaching style. - Provide access to suitable hardware and software
Digital skill building will require hardware and software. A minimum is a tablet device with a keyboard (which 1-3 students can share). For robotics, there are some really affordable hardware kits available today for schools. - Align the school environment
Implementation of cross-curricular design projects that span subject areas, group boundaries, and reach out to the society outside of school may require practical changes. Check that the school class scheduling and premises suit the project-based work. Check that practical possibilities for teacher collaboration exist.
You can read more about the characteristics of a school environment that supports digital skills education in our recent blog post.
Fundamentally, to instil a solid digital skills program in a school will always start with understanding the current state of pedagogy, attitudes, teachers’ skills and tools. No matter which digital skills program the school wants to offer, the implementation of it will always need to be tailored to the school’s situation.
Can we help your school?
We provide tools and training for a digital skills program
that will fit your objectives and current status.