The Importance of Digital Skills in Education for Teachers and Staff

The sudden switch to remote learning in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic made it clear that digital skills are not a garnish on an educator’s resume but a necessity in the 21st-century classroom. Currently, the need for teachers to be digitally competent is more pressing than ever. Educators must continually upgrade their skills to keep pace with new technologies, such as artificial intelligence. They must master these skills for their own use and be able to teach their students how to navigate the digital world.

It’s more than basic digital literacy; teachers must be digitally competent. The challenge for school leaders is keeping educators up to date with new technology when the learning needs of personnel vary widely and technology is continually changing.

Modernizing your district’s PD program to include asynchronous learning opportunities is a possible solution.

What Is the Difference between Digital Literacy and Digital Competency?

While there’s no shortage of jokes about an older generation that clings to their landlines and snail mail, most people have transitioned to the digital age. They know how to send an email and find information on the internet. Anyone who completed a teacher education program had to acquire digital skills during their years in school. Veteran educators and those new to the profession know how to use mobile devices and applications, participate in video conferences, access the wealth of information found online, and evaluate digital resources. This is basic digital literacy.

Digital competence is a more comprehensive set of skills. It includes knowledge of the legal and ethical issues involved in using technology, an awareness of privacy and security concerns, and an understanding of the role that information and communication technology plays in society and how it affects students’ lives.

The mainstreaming of AI technology has presented teachers with new questions: How can it improve lesson planning and instruction? Will its availability have a negative impact on education? To know what questions to ask and to find the answers requires a greater level of digital skills, more than what can be learned in a few in-service days.

What Digital Skills Do Educators Need?

Educators across a school district have varying levels of skills and require learning opportunities tailored to their needs. Traditional one-size-fits-all professional development programs cannot offer this. The rapid pace of change in technology and the sheer amount of learning required to be digitally competent means teachers need to continually develop their skills, including the following.

• Classroom management: Class lists, attendance logs, lesson planning and grade books, and other classroom management tools have gone digital. Educators need to be adept at using them. They need to know what educational software is available, which programs will most benefit their students, and how to use images, video, and audio content in their lessons to engage and excite those students. While good software programs are intuitive and learner-friendly, a mini-lesson on a program's features can help the teacher maximize the program’s benefits.
• Collaboration and communication: Team teaching and grade-level collaborations require educators to understand how to access and interact on collaboration platforms. Knowing how to use digital communications—email, text and instant messaging, video conferencing, etc.—and how to properly archive communication threads is essential for communicating with colleagues and reaching out to students, parents, and other members of the school community.
• Social media: Social media has become a big part of students’ lives, so much so that the US Surgeon General is calling for warning labels on social media apps. It only takes a few seconds for a student to covertly take an unflattering video of a classmate and broadcast it across TikTok. Teachers need to be familiar with these platforms and recognize when they are being used to embarrass, intimidate, and bully students. Moreover, educators often need to use social media themselves in their own role when posting to their school’s platforms. They must understand social media protocol, privacy issues, and security concerns.
• Plagiarism identification: Plagiarism is not a new problem in academia, but the internet, with its billions of pages of text, makes it easy to copy/paste whole paragraphs and entire essays. AI tech adds a new dimension to this. Teachers now must be on the lookout for AI-generated texts in a student’s work. Being able to ferret out stolen work is a skill that, unfortunately, educators in the modern classroom must have.
• Guiding students: Students need digital skills as they progress in their education and move into the workplace. They typically learn these in a dedicated computer science class, but every teacher needs to integrate this learning into their lessons. Digitally competent educators will know how to guide their students through the digital world.

For school leaders tasked with creating PD programs, offering continual personalized learning may not seem feasible, but with the right tools, it is easily possible.

Using MobileMind to Build Digital Competency

MobileMind is a learning hub that enables districts to create personalized lessons and learning paths to meet faculty professional development needs. Through a mobile app or desktop browser, learners can access micro-lessons whenever and wherever it is convenient for them.

Educators can mix and match district-created lessons with “Ready-Made” courses, such as Google Meets training, that are offered by MobileMind-certified partners to create custom learning paths. Districts may also make mandated training available in the learning hub, forgoing the need to take the teachers out of the classroom for annual training.

With MobileMind, all PD activities, including those completed inside and outside of the hub, are consolidated. School leaders can track the progress of individuals and groups. Learners are motivated to continue their learning as they earn badges and micro-credentials and engage in friendly competition with their colleagues.

Conclusion

The rapidly changing digital environment makes it difficult to keep a district’s faculty and staff up to date with the latest innovations. Infrequent in-service days cannot meet the needs of a diverse group of learners. Modernizing your district’s PD program with MobileMind will build a culture of learning where teachers can continually access lessons to develop their skills and the digital competencies that are so important in the modern world.

MobileMind provides personalized professional development through ReadyMade Marketplace. Get pre-built learning paths, micro-courses, and badges for EdTech training with one click. Schedule a call to learn more.