ICT skills with Qridi
In the modern world, functioning requires children and young people to acquire new skills. Various digital skill calendars, ICT passes, and ICT skill tables have been used for a long time to teach information and communication technology (ICT) skills. With Qridi, learning and assessing various skills can be seamlessly integrated into school life, while also building unified models that can be measured at the municipal or city level.
Standardizing the teaching and assessment of ICT skills
Different curricula for basic education usually include various objectives for teaching ICT skills at different grade levels and ICT skills are often included in a set of transversal competences. The fragmentation of objectives into different contexts makes it challenging for teachers to consider them. For this reason, various municipalities and cities have developed support materials for teachers, such as digital skill calendars, ICT skill charts, or ICT passports. The common idea behind these materials is to concretize and visualize the content to be taught for teachers.
Digital skill calendars
The use of the digital skills calendar built into Qridi is easy for both teachers and students, and information about progress begins to accumulate automatically at the classroom and school levels. In the digital skills calendar, the objectives for ICT skills are usually divided by grade for grades 1-6 and additionally by subject for grades 7-9. For the classroom teacher, the digital skills calendar brings together the ICT skill objectives for a specific grade level. From the perspective of subject teachers, the digital skills calendar also helps to distribute workload: not all topics need to be covered in all subjects. In digital skills calendars, objectives for each subject are usually divided into two to five for each grade level.
Media Literacy
Alongside information and communication technology skills, children and young people are also wanted to be taught media literacy and programming skills. How should they then be taught? What is the appropriate level for students of different ages?
The biggest challenge is integrating the goals and content into everyday life
Carefully crafted tables of learning objectives alone are not sufficient. There are still several practical issues to be addressed:
- How are the learning objectives made available to teachers? Is a printable handout or a link on a shared online platform sufficient?
- Are the practices for achieving the objectives consistent within the work community? Does everyone use, for example, the digital skills calendar, or does the beautiful idea get lost in other tasks?
- How can students be made aware of the objectives? How can progress towards the objectives be assessed, also involving the students?
- How can information about the utilization of shared content and students' progress be obtained at the school or city level?
Making goals visible and facilitating assessment with the help of Qridi
Whether it's a digital skills calendar, new literacy goals, or any other skill table, with Qridi, goals and progress can be made visible to different parties. The whole process is very effortless for the teacher: ready-made task lists are created from common contents, which teachers can use with just a few clicks. The task list contains the objectives of the digital skills calendar or a similar model as task cards, and if necessary, descriptions to specify what achieving a particular goal requires.
The teacher can utilize the task list not only for monitoring students' progress but also for assessment from the teacher's perspective. By using Qridi, various skill tables can be brought out of the closet and integrated as a permanent part of school life, preventing them from gathering dust.
Students can self-assess their progress towards the goals (on a computer or mobile device). The teacher sees an overview of students' progress in their own view: Students' self-assessments are displayed with color codes, and any media added to the self-assessment (text, image, audio clip, video, file) can be viewed by clicking on the "clip."
Students can collect badges based on their performance. Qridi generates summaries of progress for different parties: the student themselves, their guardian, the teacher at both individual and group levels, as well as an overall picture for the school and the municipality.
Alongside information and communication technology (ICT) skills, there is a desire to teach media literacy to children and young people. The task list does not limit the practice of skills to a specific format: skill practice can occur in various learning environments and through different projects or tasks. Qridi's task is to serve as a platform for making goals visible and conducting related assessments.
Qridi serves as a platform for standardizing practices across the city or school chain
Qridi on kehitetty tukemaan käytänteiden yhtenäistämistä ja tiedolla johtamista. Erilaisten taitotaulukoiden osalta tämä näkyy kahdessa asiassa:
- In Qridi, this support for standardizing practices and data-driven decision-making is reflected in two main aspects regarding various skill matrices:
- When teachers and students utilize Qridi for skill matrices, all data generated from its usage can be seamlessly transferred in real-time to the city's own data systems (such as Microsoft Power BI). This data can be disaggregated to analyze skill progression at the school, grade, and class levels.