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33 digital skills for 21st century teachers
By Clive Young, on 15 June 2012
As UCL’s project The Digital Department evolves, we are beginning to think about not only the digital literacies required by our teaching administrators (TAs) but what digital abilities are now required by all staff to enable the technological change agenda of the institution.
We have already revealed the 40+ applications that UCL administrators use in our The Digital Department – Workshop at 2012 AUA Conference and we are actively considering how skills could be developed.
I have been wondering though what a specific teaching and learning list might look like, and some kind soul has recently had a go with The 33 Digital Skills Every 21st Century Teacher should Have.
So what are they?
1- Create and edit digital audio
2- Use Social bookmarking to share resources with and between learners
3- Use blogs and wikis to create online platforms for students
4- Exploit digital images for classroom use
5- Use video content to engage students
6- Use infographics to visually stimulate students
7- Use social networking sites to connect with colleagues and grow professionally
8- Create and deliver asynchronous presentations and training sessions
9- Compile a digital e-portfolio for their own development
10- Have a knowledge about online security
11- be able to detect plagiarized works in students assignments
12- Create screen capture videos and tutorials
13- Curate web content for classroom learning
14- Use and provide students with task management tools to organize their work and plan their learning
15- Use polling software to create a real-time survey in class
16- Understand issues related to copyright and fair use of online materials
17- Exploit computer games for pedagogical purposes
18- Use digital assessment tools to create quizzes
19- Use of collaborative tools for text construction and editing
20- Find and evaluate authentic web based content
21- Use of mobile devices like tablets
22- Identify online resources that are safe for students browsing
23- Use digital tools for time management purposes
24- Learn about the different ways to use YouTube in your classroom
25- Use note taking tools to share interesting content with your students
26- Annotate web pages and highlight parts of text to share with your class
27- Use of online graphic organizers and printables
28- Use of online sticky notes to capture interesting ideas
29- Use of screen casting tools to create and share tutorials
30- Exploit group text messaging tools for collaborative project work
31- Conduct an effective search query with the minimum time possible
32- Conduct a research paper using digital tools
33- Use file sharing tools to share docs and files with students online
The original blog post explains each category and links to resources. You could argue with some and a few might be less important in HE, but most look sensible. We could also add a few UCL-specific ones such as Moodle tools, Turnitin, Lecturecast, MyPortfolio etc.
Like the TAs list is unlikely that any individual would – or indeed would want to – use all 33, but both lists together taken point to a rather formidable need for personal and/or institutional development.
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gorbould/3949071167/
3 Responses to “33 digital skills for 21st century teachers”
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Matt Whyndham wrote on 18 June 2012:
Hmph! This list is rather arbitrary, and functions as a skeleton for a particular blog post full of gee-look-what-I-found links rather than telling us anything about teaching in a digital world. It’s also a bit tool-centric, in an unhelpful way. So in number 14, the real issue is that effort and time are finite, and dependencies need to be modelled, rather than how you draw a Gantt chart.
I’d like to see someone come up with a proper system of meta-skills like “communicate in a relevant medium” with some corollaries in detail. So for this example in 1992 : use an acetate pen and an OHP machine in a room, in 2012 : give a QR code to your production on youtube.
And then delete “use online sticky notes” (why?) anyway.
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Hi all,
This is a very timely reminded to someone like me, an academic (though in a specialist non-teaching role) of how out of touch I am re new technology skills. Thanks. But, I would also want to remind readers that before they rush to attain all, or any, of these valuable skills, that the pedagogical research into effective teaching and learning in higher education clearly establishes that the fundamental factor distinguishing academics in their teaching (and its impact on student learning) is their own understanding of what it means to ‘know’ the content to be learned by the student. In other words, it is the sense they have of the material, and then how they bring the student into engagement with that material, that is most critical. I would not like this key ‘idea’ to be lost in the rush to greater digital literacy…..now I am off to review the list of skills I need to acquire. Best wishes to all from the bottom of the world.