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Digital technologies have brought changes to the nature and scope of education and led education systems worldwide to adopt strategies and policies for ICT integration. The latter brought about issues regarding the quality of teaching and learning with ICTs, especially concerning the understanding, adaptation, and design of the education systems in accordance with current technological trends. These issues were emphasized during the recent COVID-19 pandemic that accelerated the use of digital technologies in education, generating questions regarding digitalization in schools. Specifically, many schools demonstrated a lack of experience and low digital capacity, which resulted in widening gaps, inequalities, and learning losses. Such results have engendered the need for schools to learn and build upon the experience to enhance their digital capacity and preparedness, increase their digitalization levels, and achieve a successful digital transformation. Given that the integration of digital technologies is a complex and continuous process that impacts different actors within the school ecosystem, there is a need to show how these impacts are interconnected and identify the factors that can encourage an effective and efficient change in the school environments. For this purpose, we conducted a non-systematic literature review. The results of the literature review were organized thematically based on the evidence presented about the impact of digital technology on education and the factors that affect the schools’ digital capacity and digital transformation. The findings suggest that ICT integration in schools impacts more than just students’ performance; it affects several other school-related aspects and stakeholders, too. Furthermore, various factors affect the impact of digital technologies on education. These factors are interconnected and play a vital role in the digital transformation process. The study results shed light on how ICTs can positively contribute to the digital transformation of schools and which factors should be considered for schools to achieve effective and efficient change.

Maker education provides the perfect context for young learners to develop 21st-century skills. However, research is inconclusive on how these skills could be assessed. Namely, the complex nature of 21st-century skills requires different types of assessments, not necessarily relying on paper-and-pencil or multiple-choice tests, but rather drawing on the learners’ perspective in the form of self-assessment and reflection. Prior studies highlighted several challenges of situating self-assessment in makerspace contexts, such as the lack of dedicated technology for documentation, distractions caused by noise or group work, and the lack of skills and motivation to practice self-assessment. This paper presents an exploratory case study aimed at an in-depth investigation of the use of a digital self-assessment tool of 21st-century skills in makerspace contexts. The authors converged qualitative data collected mainly from interviews with teachers and students. Researcher observations and tool log files (e.g., student work in the digital tool) were used as triangulation sources. Although challenges emerged, the study presents encouraging findings regarding the use of the digital tool for raising students’ awareness of their development of 21st -century skills and engaging them in self-assessment and reflection. The results of the study provide rich insights to guide future research on the topic.

E-textiles provide an interesting field of research as they “blend traditional craft with modern science” (Peppler, 2016) and help learners “broaden their own perceptions of computing” (Searle et al., 2016). Despite the promising findings by primarily long-term interventions structured around e-textiles, educational curriculum reform has been slow to materialize. Educators who embrace a STEAM philosophy are more likely to endorse short workshops, integrating them in existing courses or initiatives; this could serve as a steppingstone for longer interventions and bottom-up curriculum reform. This study examines whether shorter e-textile workshops (lasting four hours) can result in significant gains in understanding. We present an investigation of e-textiles with 22 young children who have no prior experience with e-textiles or working with microprocessors. We present details of our learning design, as well as findings related to circuitry knowledge and computational making skills. We find that the children advanced their circuitry knowledge and practice a range of computational making skills. We further document a series of emerging challenges, including the children’s unwillingness to engage or lack of adeptness with software, a tension between aesthetics and construction, creativity limited by samples of previous e-textile projects, and the difficulty in grasping the materiality of e-textiles. We propose that some direct instruction and facilitation is not incompatible with the making ethos; the approach can help address these challenges, allowing young children to benefit from their participation in short-duration e-textile workshops.

E-textiles provide an interesting field of research as they “blend traditional craft with modern science” (Peppler, 2016) and help learners “broaden their own perceptions of computing” (Searle et al., 2016). Despite the promising findings by primarily long-term interventions structured around e-textiles, educational curriculum reform has been slow to materialize. Educators who embrace a STEAM philosophy are more likely to endorse short workshops, integrating them in existing courses or initiatives; this could serve as a steppingstone for longer interventions and bottom-up curriculum reform. This study examines whether shorter e-textile workshops (lasting four hours) can result in significant gains in understanding. We present an investigation of e-textiles with 22 young children who have no prior experience with e-textiles or working with microprocessors. We present details of our learning design, as well as findings related to circuitry knowledge and computational making skills. We find that the children advanced their circuitry knowledge and practice a range of computational making skills. We further document a series of emerging challenges, including the children’s unwillingness to engage or lack of adeptness with software, a tension between aesthetics and construction, creativity limited by samples of previous e-textile projects, and the difficulty in grasping the materiality of e-textiles. We propose that some direct instruction and facilitation is not incompatible with the making ethos; the approach can help address these challenges, allowing young children to benefit from their participation in short-duration e-textile workshops.

Despite the opportunities that makerspaces and FabLabs offer for the development of 21st-century skills, understanding how these skills are being practiced and assessed in these spaces has been proven challenging. In this work, we address this gap through an interview study investigating 13 maker-educators’ practices across different makerspaces and FabLabs. The findings reveal that, in general, maker-educators’ practice is not guided by any formal 21st century skills framework. Instead, they draw ideas from their national school curricula, literature, and primarily their own experiences and perceived best practices in their contexts. They report evidence of practicing 21st-century skills, most frequently referring to five skills: collaboration, creativity, communication, life/social skills, and problem-solving. Yet, they do not explicitly assess the development of these skills, for reasons that have to do with (i) the practical nature of making, which emphasizes the development of a tangible result and not skills development as such, (ii) the demanding nature of the making activities, which requires a lot of hands-on time, leaving no room for assessment, (iii) the making ethos, which presents maker-educators with choices around what to pursue and how to go about it, and cannot restrict making activities within the boundaries of formal assessment practices. The study helped to document some making practices linked to the practicing of 21st-century skills, as reported by the participating maker-educators. Future work could focus on the design of assessment practices and tools that can help to capture and advance the development of 21st-century skills in maker contexts, while respecting the openness in the making ethos.

The innovation and rapid growth of internet technologies and devices have brought changes to the higher education landscape. Technologies such as virtual learning environments, cloud services, synchronous and asynchronous communication tools that can be accessed via the Internet have gradually emerged and gained ground, reshaping students' academic practices in different ways. Despite that, research shows that the potential of internet technologies to enhance students' learning experience has not been fully exploited. Several studies have reported that internet technologies in academic settings are used for convenience rather than for strengthening students' academic study habits. Additionally, according to research, higher education students are not aware of the enabling capabilities of internet technologies and how they can be used in the context of higher education. This paper presents part of a design-based research study that aimed to develop an instructional intervention that enhances undergraduate students' internet skills in the context of higher education. The intervention was based on the internet skills indicators from the Internet Skills Scale (ISS) proposed by Van Deursen, Helsper & Eynon (2014), which was validated for the context of higher education. To guide the intervention, we have developed a framework that links internet skills to internet technologies and their educational affordances in academic settings. The framework refers to five types of skills: Operational, Information-Navigation, Social, Creative, and Critical. For each of the skills' type, several internet technologies have been identified together with their potential to support academic practice. The framework can serve as a tool to perceive the affordances of internet technologies for learning in higher education and prepare higher education staff to better support the effective and productive use of the Internet in academic environments.