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Why supporting pupils’ basic digital skills is essential today?

We first have to understand what are basic digital skills. They are defined in the European Digital Competence Framework called DigComp which provides concrete examples of knowledge, skills and attitudes people need to assess digital content. 

Normally we have this note that young people who have been born with an iPhone in their hand are so-called digital natives but it has proven to be wrong. They might be excellent users of different applications and devices, they can create videos and all kind of things, play games.   

But when we are asking them, for example to analyse online content, is it reliable or not, they are a little bit lost, because the basic digital skills are compliant on several areas. 

And one of the most important area is how to analyse the information you meet in social media or on online platforms. But it's not only that. It's linked to e.g. content creation, how to create content respecting, e.g. copyrights.   

It's linked to the information security: how to protect my personal data and my privacy. Legal and ethical issues: what are the digital rights of the citizens and what are the obligations. It's media literacy skills: understanding and analysing different types of media. Communication and collaboration using digital tools for effective communication.  

So we have in Europe this goal that by % of the European citizens should have basic digital skills and we have still lot to do. 

How can digital skills be supported through different school subjects?

Every young person and actually we adults too, we need critical digital literacy skills. So they have to be taught how to critically evaluate online content  and for example generative AI outputs: what are the impact of recommendation algorithms on search results and recommendations.  

They should be aware of how our data is collected and used mainly against us,  and how to manage privacy and digital security in digital environment. 

The school curricula, first of all, should contain digital education element to allow the teachers to deal with these important skills in their lessons. 

But there is also huge need to upskill teachers of various subjects to deal with these issues in their lessons, and a lot of teacher training is needed.  

How do Finnish schools approach the teaching of digital skills?

In Finland, the media and information literacy is seen as a civic competence important to every citizen from a quite early age. It's an essential part of national curricula and it starts from early education. 

In spite of this good curricular, it's only during the Covid time that all the schools in Finland had to take additional steps to be digitally ready to provide digital education in distance.   

And the most important thing was training of the teachers. We noticed that the best way to upskill teachers was having tutor teachers: peers who were teaching other teachers in field on how to use digital tools in practice. So in Finland we have now quite good IT tutor system which is really productive. 

So in summary we need good curriculum, we need teachers who are trained and also sufficient hardware, software and platforms.

How can the progressive nature of digital skills be addressed through teaching?

The Finnish Ministry of Education has just published so-called new literacy approach in which teachers get practical information about the learning outcomes. People should learn how to use digital tools, devices and applications in documentation, play, interaction, games, exploration activities and artistic actions to produce things. So that's part of the early education and primary. 

In the, let's say, primary and secondary the people should be given possibilities on practicing, experimenting, producing content with the help of digital tools to promote creative thinking and teamwork.  

And in the lower secondary, the pupil should be able to search for information from media contents and to examine his or her ways of obtaining information critically. 

How do you see the future of digital skills and literacy education?

How should they teach students to use AI technology safely and responsibly when schools in majority of the countries do not yet have clear guidelines on which AI services are safe to use and how to teach new skills with partly outdated curricula. 

I would say that we should support teachers by all means. The goal is to enable individuals to engage with the AI technologies in a responsible, informed, ethical and impactful manner. And that means that in the forthcoming months and a year educational institutions all over the Europe must have a massive in-service training for their teachers on how to use responsibly AI systems.   

And what is important that we teachers could also share our knowledge with others. AI is a new thing for many and that's why sharing knowledge can help our colleagues better.