This is the time in the calendar when we teachers start thinking about the lessons learnt all along the year and begin to get underway to make our resolutions for being better the coming one.
Some people regard the 2020 as kind of an “empty year.” As we all well know, the pandemics turned everything upside down for everybody, not only in the teaching field, but also in our lives: social contact has been unimaginable and teachers have had to adapt to the new normal: teaching from home using platforms we perhaps had heard of but largely overlooked; as a consequence, we needed to take a crash course to cope with the ongoing conditions. Even when the digital capability was not all that new, it had not been fully developed, since most institutions had always prioritized the face-to-face classes as the one-and-the-only way that was worthy to be marketed.
However, not everything is negative in this end-of-the year balance: teachers have proved to be resilient and the ones that were more open to change were always updated and kept being informed about using technology in their classes. We cannot deny that one thing is to know something as our comparative advantage and another to depend on it to keep on working: not only did it demand to adapt our resources to the virtual world, but also our methodology, the evaluation system, the autonomy of our students and the empathy, topics that are going to be fully developed in the coming weeks throughout the subsequent posts. In a nutshell: it was like a tsunami of changes and we all had just one choice: to cope.
Some of us were supported by our institutions and had intensive training to optimize our teaching; others were not that lucky and had to figure out a way on their own. Fortunately, the world is more global now and there are always ways to support colleagues and to learn from others, which in turn, even meant getting some help from our own children or younger generations.
Being a digitally-competent citizen is a must nowadays and this leads to all areas of our lives: interacting in the social media, shopping online, using apps to study, streaming for entertainment (such as music and films), finding accurate information on the web, even applying for a job . Life has changed so much lately. Never had we envisioned such changes…we mistakenly regarded them as the future….the future seems to have caught up with the very present and is now upon us; and, furthermore, it is here to stay.
Are you up to embrace technology and develop your digital competence?
It is high time to learn new skills and to go with the flow if your aim is to have a say in our profession. And last, but not least important, having the proper hardware and internet connection is a must if you do not want to end up in your own personal digital island.
