Hyun Joon Lee
VIA21
Challenge
Two months ago, I coached an elderly teacher in a middle school. She was a teacher with some knowledge of edutech tools, including Google Classroom, Google Meet, and Jamboard. However, while coaching her online, she asked for help saying that her Chrome extension icon had disappeared, and it turned out that she was trying to find the extension icon in Edge rather than Chrome. It was a shock to me. Because of COVID-19, she was forced to learn Edu-Tech tools in a hurry and learned tools only with a focus on 'how to use', so it was difficult to figure out the reason or solve such basic problem on her own. These ridiculous things are happening quite often in the educational field now. Many teachers focus only on 'how to use', and most of the media that teachers can learn and access, such as books, the Internet, and YouTube, focus only on 'how to use'. This is because demand is concentrated on 'how to use'. Therefore, if a problem occurs while using technology, many teachers cannot figure out what is wrong and cannot find a way to solve it. In addition, while using tools with various possibilities and potential, they are often using tools only at an essential level. For these reasons, the digital literacy gap between teachers continues to widen. And teachers with poor digital literacy are losing confidence and becoming passive. I think this is a big problem in education. Due to the prolonged COVID-19 crisis, the proportion of technology in education is increasing, so the current atmosphere focusing on 'how to use' in education must change.