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Reflections WEEK 1

Digital Competence is one of the competences which is reflected on the primary curriculum. This is clear no only within Spanish regulation, but is also one of the learning directions provided from the European Commission.Nobody within the education environment would doubt about the need to develop such a competence as, could we consider a person literate in the next few years if he or she was unable to use the new technologies? Few years back, those who were unable to, at least read, write and do some calculations were considered illiterate. The reality has changed though, and in a new era where new technology is fully present, we would consider that those who do not have the capability of managing some sort of new technology would be today´s illiterate.I understand for many of us, having to adapt to this new era can be quite difficult and require and extra effort. If not, let´s think about our own experience…have we always have pc available to us? Were these handy to us? Younger generations have had these devices as part of their life, so have they had other appliances too. However, my own personal experience has been completely different. I can still recall my IT classes at high school, which were optional and were we would learn MS-DOS programme. What for? Who knows!Later at the university, computers were not available and only very few of us would have it at home. This meant that the work we had to present was either written by a typewriter!!Since then, things have definitely changed and even though I have developed in that sense, 

I must admit that, generally speaking, I am still a basic user. Personally, I use new technology as to obtain information and communicate and for, what I would call, very basic content creation and problem solving.One of the videos I have seen about VLE, mentions that if you do not also contribute to creating content or share information with others, these can finally get bored of doing so with you and could stop wanting to share information with you. This made me remind me what I believe is my own use of some applications were I can define myself as been visitor but definitely not a resident. Thus, I am not only a digital immigrant but also just a visitor, who would find difficult to change this attitude; unless I changed some believes, such as the idea that virtual relationships are not such quality relationships, as real relationships are.I believe that creating our own PLE would be extremely useful for me. There have been occasions where I have discovered very useful websites but I have not been able to record such information, therefore, starting to use this new application can be of a great value in my future. I also love the idea of the new learning focus that this tool represent, which is “you decide what you want to learn, what is important for you and you are the one stating your learning objectives”. I wished all future educators would be able to work under such paradigm, remove the focus on exams and rather focus on what students find motivating to learn and support them in this learning process.