Teachers in the 21st century. I know them, they’ve been my teachers too. Yet, as I’m on the way to becoming one, I realise it’s not as trivial as it sounds. This post offers a personal and incomplete definition.
Where to start? The teacher of today should be attentive to their students’ needs and resourceful when solving the unique problems they face. This means educating about digital technology too and being confident in the digital world, such as being able to find and filter information. What else should 21st-century teachers, we, possess? We should be able to learn new skills on our own, for example handling new technology. And if we’re not succeeding in that, we should ask for help, as self-consciousness is another important quality of today's teachers. We should strive to help and to do that, we need many many skills.
We should be invested in giving their students a skillset similar to our own.
Now that we talked about desirable skills in general, I’d like to discuss the importance of a specific area of digital teacher competence: safety. It’s the area where my skills are lacking the most. It’s also an area, undoubtedly important, but I don’t think we recognise the reality of this.
The DigComp 2.1 (find the full name at the end of the text) separates 4 fields in this area: protecting devices, protecting personal data and privacy, protecting health and well-being, and protecting the environment.
Why protecting the devices enabling our presence in the digital world is self-explanatory. It’s essential. It also comes in handy when teaching about the Iliad: the Trojan horse as a statue made of wood with a bunch of armed soldiers inside. Or Trojan horse the computer virus? It brings the idea so much closer, right into our life.
Protecting personal data and privacy should clearly be talked about in class. Doxxing ourselves is far too easy, and telling our students to just stay off the internet is opposing our goal of helping them become confident in the digital world.
The protection of health and well-being is often misunderstood for the topic of smartphone addiction, while in truth, it’s much more, and the “only befriend people on Facebook if you know them” is not enough advice. As caring for children is part of a teacher’s duties, it doesn’t need an explanation that educating students about how to use digital technologies safely (while staying physically and mentally unharmed) is important. Just because it’s indoors, it doesn’t mean it’s safe.
Lastly, the connection between environmental protection and digital technology is a cardinal question. Our students will see more of the future we are forming with our current decisions about the environment. It has to be our responsibility too, to point out how much energy hundreds of new spam in our email accounts can be, and how easy it is to just delete them.
Students who are educated on these matters deeply enough that they can create their own informative content about it move around more confidently and self-consciously in the digital world.
sources: Carretero, S.; Vuorikari, R. and Punie, Y. (2017). DigComp 2.1: The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens with eight proficiency levels and examples of use, EUR 28558 EN, doi:10.2760/38842
illustration: my own
