Preparing for the Digital Future: Essential EdTech Skills for K-12 Teachers

Are you a K-12 teacher? Or maybe you're studying to become one, and you're halfway through an online EdD program, learning how to teach effectively. Teaching is truly a noble calling, as you sacrifice your time, energy, and effort to shape the minds of the future. It can be an incredibly rewarding profession as you see young minds grasp ideas, develop critical thinking skills, and actively solve problems. Some people even work their way up into administrative or management positions, such as coordinators, principals, or superintendents.

But teaching in 2024 is vastly different from teaching in 1994 or even 2004. We're in the midst of a digital revolution, and kids need to be prepared for a digital future. This helpful article will help you prepare for this advent in the classroom, sharing the essential EdTech skills for K-12 teachers tailored for the entire range of student ages, skills, and abilities. Continue reading to learn more.

Why EdTech Skills Development is Important

As a teacher, it's your job to equip the children you teach with the skills, knowledge, and thinking to prepare them for the wider world. We live in a society that is absolutely permeated with technology. Almost all of your kids would have grown up immersed in it in a household with several devices, including smartphones, tablets, and computers.

By learning EdTech skills yourself, you're then in a position to transfer this learning to your students, equipping them for the workplace and a future where they will need to understand how technology works, how to use different types of technology and have a fundamental tech literacy foundation. As you can see, your upskilling in EdTech will be essential to this.

Set Up the Classroom for Tech Use

You'll need to learn how to set up a classroom for technology use and how to empower and teach children to use devices effectively in an educational setting. The more flexible you can be with this, the better.

Getting creative with seating plans and arrangements can allow you to teach a greater variety of tech-based lessons and activities. Seating variety will also increase student engagement and help break up social cliques and exclusionary behaviour. Furthermore, flexible seating will promote student creativity, collaboration, and choice.

One way to build in this flexibility when it comes to device use in the classroom is to have a few distinct spaces for different kinds of EdTech activities. These spaces could include pair or group tables and other arrangements.

In the pair or group tables, students can collaborate and share devices, which can help with peer-to-peer learning and assistance and can help to keep them on task.

You can also set up a quiet space with beanbags, cushions, and other relaxing seating where students can work by themselves, to journal or reflect on prior lessons.

Finally, you can push all the tables together to emulate a conference room setting for larger group activities, including roundtable discussions, culture-building activities, educational games, or group instruction using devices.

Coding for Kids

Another EdTech skill you can learn and teach to your students is coding. Computer code languages make all of the software, websites and applications we use daily possible. From word processing to banking apps to computer games and more, it's all code in the backend. Learning coding, or how to use coding apps for kids, can be an excellent EdTech skill for K-12 teachers to learn. The great thing about this is that there are a range of coding apps suitable for kindergarten through to senior high school students.

The apps for younger kids are gamified, such as CodeAPillar and CodeSpark, which teach the basics of coding hidden within a fun game. As you move up through the age range of school, the coding concepts and tasks can become more challenging and complex, reflecting student's capabilities and capacity to understand and work with code. Learning how to teach this is a valuable EdTech skill for all teachers.

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Learning Design

A core EdTech skill, learning design is the process of creating effective and engaging learning experiences, lessons and activities using technology. Using this skill, you'll work to understand the needs, goals and learning requirements of your students based on their learning profiles and the curriculum and then apply pedagogical principles and theories. You'll learn to select the best tools, media and lessons to apply in the classroom and then evaluate and monitor outcomes, working to improve student learning. You can utilize different software, platforms and applications to improve your learning design skills, and this essential EdTech skill will elevate your teaching from years K-12.

Develop Research Skills

Another essential EdTech skill you need to prepare for the digital future is research skills and ability. You need to be able to conduct and apply relevant research to inform your teaching practice and help you to innovate in the classroom. Researching, which you would've learned while studying your educational qualification, involves identifying and defining a problem and reviewing the relevant literature and evidence to inform your problem-solving. You'll also need to learn how to design and conduct experiments to test hypotheses and analyze and interpret data. Finally, reporting and disseminating findings is another important element of this EdTech skill.

To hone your research skills and apply them in the classroom and teach students how to research effectively, you need to develop critical thinking and analytical skills, learn about ethics in research, and follow scientific methods.

You might want to stay across all the relevant research in EdTech, perhaps subscribing to databases and journals, attending conferences, and reading online forums and platforms.

Use EdTech to Tailor Learning

Finally, you can use your EdTech skills to tailor learning based on the curriculum and student's interests. Technology can help you plug into lessons and resources from around the world and across the web. For instance, if your class is studying volcanoes and geology, you could arrange a livestream Q&A with a professional geologist or stream a live feed of an active volcano. For biology lessons, you can live stream zoo cameras to study animals or use YouTube for a video lesson.

An EdTech Summary

This article has assisted you in preparing your students for the digital future. We've covered essential EdTech skills for K-12 teachers. EdTech is essential for students learning as you prepare them for life in the future. From coding apps to learning design principles and research, we've covered what EdTech skills you should develop and implement in your lesson plans.