Digital Literacy: The Need to Prepare Students for the 21st Century Workplace
Posted on November 24, 2012 by Deborah S
Dobson & Willinsky (2009) noted that the “digital aspect of literacy, invisible to the naked eye, is the very current that drives the global information economy” (p. 1). The need for a digitally literate population is critical if Canada is to successfully compete in the world economy, especially given that the service sector comprises 70% of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) and employs 76% of the Canadian population (Chinien & Boutin, 2011). The challenge facing educators is how to ensure today’s students are prepared for the 21st century workplace.
By Justin Marquis Ph.D. The Great Divide is Getting Wider Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Even as technology advances and becomes increasingly ubiquitous, little doubt remains that there is an ever-widening digital ...
The new digital education environment will look and function very differently. In addition to classroom teaching, staff will develop new ways of teaching that embrace digital education, and ‘bring your own device’ learning models will be integrated into the learning environment. Strong leadership in schools will be needed to support this new environment, to increase teacher capacity and to support the uptake of digital education in schools.
A growing number of kids at increasingly younger ages are engaging in online social networking today--a development that is leading to a surge of news stories, media attention, and economic investment.
Many people assume that student teachers, digital natives (Prensky, 2005) who have grown up with technology, automatically know how to integrate technology into their teaching, and yet the reverse has been found (Lei, 2009; Pope, Hare, & Howard, 2002; Russell, Bebell, O’Dwyer, & O’Connor, 2003). Student teachers are very competent in using information technology (IT) in their daily lives, and yet they may not have a clear idea of how to integrate IT into teaching and learning. Therefore, it is important for teacher education programs to integrate content, pedagogy, and technology (Hughes, 2005; Koehler, Mishra, & Yahya, 2007) and also for teacher educators to model IT pedagogical competencies in classroom teaching (Gomez, Sherin, & Griesdorn, 2008; Kim & Hannafin, 2009; Lim & Chan, 2007; Nicholas & Ng, 2009).