iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

""Digital skills are vital for students today because this is what their jobs will look like in the future," says veteran middle school teacher Kay Vanzant-Bradney of Nelson Academy in Long Beach, California. "And given our circumstances right now, with the pandemic and remote learning, if you don't have digital skills, you literally can't connect with your education."

This is why her students use Google's Applied Digital Skills, a free, video-based, online digital literacy curriculum. Through flexible project-based learning, each lesson teaches foundational digital and technological skills. Students learn to solve real-world problems, like how to craft resumes, design infographics and create interactive presentations from scratch."

Computational thinking isn’t new. Three decades ago, Seymour Papert introduced computational thinking when he developed the concept of bricolage, which is the construction of something new from many sources.

He rightly understood the significance of computers, and with computational thinking, he surmised that they would not only be an integral part of our educational process, but we would need to acquire new ways for learning when using computers.

In essence, the bricoleur builds knowledge by engaging in a process of building precise steps that encourage the construction of knowledge. Papert recognized that over time, the learner’s theory may change as the result of refining his or her responses in any of the four stages of computational thinking.

Even before Papert’s work, however, educational visionaries insisted that the way to solve problems in any field was by adopting sequential problem-solving methods, which became algorithmic or computational thinking.

In short, we use computational thinking (CT) to solve problems.

In a perfect world, all of our students would come to school every day well rested, well fed, clean, healthy, happy, feeling good about themselves and ready to learn. But some of the time, and perhaps for a significant segment of our students, that is not the reality. So yes, schools need to be clear on their priorities and make tough choices in supporting students while making sure their basic and psychological needs are met before we can aspire to assist them with their self-fulfillment needs.

It’s a delicate dance schools must do in supporting students with their varying needs; a balancing act of sorts that comes with great consequence. What complicates this even further is the reality of the very dynamic, digital world our students are growing up in. With a shifting world, comes shifting needs. And along with shifting needs comes a shifting role that schools must take on in order to best prepare students moving forward. We must revisit the graphic above to explore and best support students with their changing needs in our DIGITAL WORLD. In some cases, students get these emerging needs related to our shifting world met at home, but for others, this is not the case for a variety of reasons.