My thoughts about Digital Competences

Today I wanted to write about the importance of Digital Competences for education as well as for me. Do you want to know a bit more about this? So, here we go!

As we all know, our society has totally changed from some years till now as it has been digitalised. We are living in a world in which technology is crucial for every field. Therefore, I believe that, more than a possible training in this domain, it should become a must for which we all should be prepared. Today it is something essential so that our daily life can be developed without any lack. Then, what about education? I consider for some time now, learners have gotten used to a very passive way of teaching. In fact, some days ago we talked about this in our Learning and personality development class. We discussed our society has decided to select an educational method for which students go to classes just to hear teachers talking about some topics. Then, they will have to memorise them to take an exam that will be evaluated with a mark that will make their long-term future. And this is like that, at all. So, I ask myself, how can we not be worried about this? This is specially shocking! Is this real learning? Of course, it is not! We cannot allow the only thing that matters is to memorize certain contents to obtain a certain result, we need to learn but always with the aim of developing our critical thinking and something that we have loaded: achieving creativity! Today’s teaching method has so many limits that it has provoked the absolute loss of reasoning and creativity in students. We need this to change immediately.

I think the fault is that we are so used to this teaching model that we do not realize the problem that is taking place. Personally, it was last year while I was in one of my subjects at University, Information and Communication Technologies, that I started to be aware of that issue. I want to make special mention to my teacher, Margarita Vinagre, who was the one who aroused my interest in this field and who made me realize I wanted to be part of the change. That was the reason why I decided to write my end-of-degree project about digital competences. I took advantage of what she taught us related to the benefits the introduction of technology could bring for an educational improvement and I took that to the classrooms during my internship period in a high school. My objective was to work with digital resources every day in a French course. To do this, before starting any activity, I gave scholars a Google Forms questionnaire to know their feelings about tech and the current learning methods. After that, I started my classes mixing gamification and projects. At the end, I gave them the same questionnaire in order to evaluate if their digital competence had improved as well as if their motivation and creativity had increased. I was totally surprised as students did so but, they also told me they had realized that they had enjoyed the learning process. What they loved the most was my choice to incorporate the gamification method. Today, this reminds me of Quest To Learn, the innovative school I researched about some days ago and which I found fascinating. I am sure that my future teaching will include these active learning methodologies for sure! It seems to me that this is a key thing we need to keep in mind as, as I said earlier, I feel that we have put aside the fact that students enjoy the process and acquire real and useful learning.

All in all, the subject of Innovation in Education and TICs this year is kind of a second part of what last year started for me, and I am enjoying the process! Once again, I totally agree digital competences are a must for nowadays society and they need to be trained since our first stepst at school.

I’d love to know what your opinion on this topic is! See you next time!!