Creative Production With Tablet Applications for Learning Digital, Social, and Interpersonal Skills in the Primary-Level Classroom

This paper looks at a primary school curriculum for information and communication technologies (ICT) and the digital skills taught and practiced by students during these lessons in comparison to their practices
and experiences outside school. Discrepancies between what children make with digital tools outside school
and during ICT lessons are identified and used to design and test a model that enables digital, social, and
interpersonal skills learning and practice. The paper presents the tested model as a proposal to transform the
primary school ICT curriculum and pave the way for contextual digital, social, and interpersonal skills learning
and practice.The skills children need to acquire today to ensure future job security are evolving from “perennial” skills to “contextual” (Dede, 2009). The ability to collaborate with people from various backgrounds is of growing importance in information-based economies where work is no longer a solitary experience as in the past (Karoly & Panis, 2004). Classrooms should provide opportunities for group collaboration and contextual digital skills learning and practice. This research demonstrates the objective to use primary-level ICT lessons as a platform where children can learn such skills.