Building a Digital Learning Culture by Rethinking Pedagogies for the 21st Century

Introduction

Digital learning has fundamentally altered teaching methods and activities in today’s classroom. In fact, digital learning has brought about wholesale changes to educational system infrastructure as well as to the means and methods of instruction at all levels of education. Transferring and incorporating technological changes quickly, ubiquitously, and subconsciously in education is profoundly difficult unless teachers themselves are willing to embrace the changes. Technology integration reaches far beyond the addition of technology for teaching purposes; requiring teachers to become key players as digital facilitators. The new digital learning culture requires teachers to evolve from a traditional teacher-centered mindset to become digital teaching designers, mentors, facilitators, and evaluators. The digital learning culture has also led to a change in the roles of teachers as digital classroom managers and also computational-thinking designers. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to discuss the effective integration of technology in building a new digital learning culture by considering existing and emerging pedagogies, teaching methods and learning activities, including suggestions put forward for stakeholders in the form of a roadmap. The discussion centers on how to effectively integrate technology and create a new digital learning culture framed according to the 2017 ISTE Standards for Educators (International Society for Technology in Education, n.d.a), where teachers are expected to model Learner, Leader, Citizen, Collaborator, Designer, Facilitator, and Analyst roles throughout their profession.