Lesson 6: Developing Basic Digital Skills

Developing Basic Digital Skills

In Lesson 5, we tackled about the different preferences of the old and new generation and now we will learn what are the skills that is needed to be developed by the “technology learners” or “digital learners.”  Today, the 3 R’s (writing, reading & arithmetic) which is the emphasis in the old generation does not need to be replaced by the new digital skills hence, the previously mentioned skills should complement to equip students to face the new millennium. Shown in the figure below is the list of the skills that is needed to be developed by the learners of the new generation.

Rather than call them literacy skills, these are better referred as fluency skills conveying the ease and facility in acquiring and using them. Let us now familiarize ourselves as to what these six fluencies are.

Ø  Solution Fluency – the capacity and creativity in problem solving.

Ø  Information Fluency – ability to access, retrieve, assess and rewrite the information.

Ø  Collaboration Fluency – refers to teamwork with virtual or real partners in the online environment.

Ø  Media Fluency – media refers to mass communication or digital sources. The ability to evaluate the message of a chosen media and creative ability to publish digital messages.

Ø  Creativity Fluency – refers to the artistic proficiency by way of design, art, and story-telling to package a message.

Ø  Digital ethics – principles of leadership, global responsibility, environmental awareness, global citizenship, and personal accountability.

            There is also a new proposed taxonomy in the development of the higher thinking skills (shown below) from the general framework of Bloom’s taxonomy of thinking skills which requires information processing, idea creation, and real-world problem solving skills.

Figure 1. Proposed Taxonomy

            This was patterned after the how the human brain works. The human brain is divided into two hemisphere: the right and left hemispheres. These two hemispheres have their specific inclination in terms of brain activity. The brain activity is shown in the figure below.

In the instructional process, there is also what we call an “instructional shift” from lecture-to-tasks to digital tasks-to-learning. In this approach, skills are developed and the learning outcome is achieved by students themselves. The structured problem solving process known as the 4 D’s also exemplifies the instructional shift in digital learning:

Ø    Define the problem

Ø    Design the solution

Ø    Do the work

Ø    Debrief on the outcome

Because of the shift in the instruction, there also occurred a shift in terms of skills in which as mentioned earlier were the fluency skills. These skills has been within the new generation and would be new to the old generation. In my own experience, the some of the above mentioned fluencies have been basically acquired before I knew what it was. The full functionality of these skills will be achieved through trainings, practice and application to the real world. For instance, before I had known information fluency,I had been accessing information from the internet when answering some of my assignments in elementary and high school and was also very particular in the design of my PowerPoint presentation when I had my reports in class.

Reflecting on these, I realized to incorporate and develop these digital skills to the basic literacy of the 3 Rs in which one should be able to complement these literacies and skills to attain success in the millennial world. As we adjust our way of teaching to effectively match the digital world of information and communication technology, we must be clear on what basic skills, knowledge and values are we going to develop to the digital learners.

As future educators, we should shift our teaching and learning process from the traditional teacher-centered to the student-centered learning wherein we will encourage discovery learning and know that our role as teachers would be to act as facilitator of learning and not the give all spoon-feeding type of learning. Let us move away from the center stage of the classroom and let the students have the limelight of the teaching-learning process.