When it comes to digital skills education, recent discussions and interviews with education providers shed light to three problems:
- Teachers lack an understanding of the direction to take in teaching digital skills. The amount of information and different directions to take is overwhelming.
- Curriculum offers only high level learning goals that are difficult to interpret or easy to undermine
- It’s difficult to integrate coding and digital creation to school subjects without making it a completely separate subject.
How to find solutions to these problems?
Finding the direction for digital skills education is definitely difficult but the answer is simple: Students should have a basic understanding how the technological world around them functions and how they can be active with technology tools. We need to guide students to be active producers and critical thinkers.
Goals in the curriculum have to be inspected through this same lens. Students should study for life, not for grades. This is difficult to achieve for a teacher as the curriculum and official exams demand otherwise. As long as the system stays this way, a healthy compromise of learning for life and learning for exams should be found.
Coding is a great tool for digital creation and STEAM projects. To integrate it to different subjects, we need well-designed and motivating projects. Design principle is as follows: Collect the learning goals, make an interesting project that meets those goals and make a coherent learning path to that project. It surely takes time but it’s worth it.
We’ve learnt our lesson as well
During the last 4 years, our pedagogy team has learned to analyse the needs of individual schools and answer them with tailored points of action.
For this we’ve packaged Teachease service that effectively tackles these problems: You can get started for free by filling a Gap Analysis form. It gives education providers, such as principals and ICT learning designers, a set of tailored suggestions and an offer for a training package that helps their school to get where they want to be in terms of digital education.
Learn more and find the free Gap Analysis form here: Code School Finland’s TEACHEASE