Principals, school administrators and senior teachers from schools across the island have completed a digital education leadership training workshop.

The week-long programme was a collaboration between the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College’s E-Learning Academy and The Taiwan International Cooperation and Development Fund (ICDF). The workshop is a response to the growing need to develop capacity in Technology Enabled Instruction among practitioners in Saint Lucia’s education system. E-Learning Specialist, Royston Emmanuel in highlighting the importance of enhancing the skills and abilities of the nation’s most valuable resource indicated that, “We are  uniquely positioned as a small country with not many resources, our key resource is of course our human resource and this is why I’m so happy that we had such a turn out for those sessions because it showed that our principals are very interested in developing our human capacity, in encouraging, in ensuring that there is continuity in education.”

Digital literacy refers to an individual's ability to find, evaluate, and clearly communicate information through typing and other media on various digital platforms. Digital Literacy has become even more important with the advent of the COVID19 pandemic which resulted in students having transition to online learning. Dr. Harriette Da Silva is the Dean of the Teacher Education Department at the Saint Vincent Community College. She says, “Governments have tried to meet the challenges by assisting students and teachers with devices and access but the challenges of principals to ensure that the teachers deliver the courses using technological resources and not just transferring face to face teaching to the technology is why we were here for the two days. We hope that this workshop has enlightened you, as how to face the challenges and how you need to ensure that your teachers are prepared for the classroom and the input that you need.” 

Dr. Harriette Da Silva, along with eight facilitators from the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College assisted with the face-to-face workshop. Principal of the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College, Dr. Keith Nurse opined that the COVID19 pandemic provided an opportunity for improvement. “We are shifting out of that emergency remote learning scenario into embedding digital education as a core element of the learning experience. This allows us to operate in market spaces and to address the concerns and needs of learners wherever they are. In fact, Dr. Da Silva used a term wherever, whenever and so forth, and so no longer are we restricted by the geographic boundaries of an island or two or a region and it is in that spirit our E-Learning Academy have profited to offer our services to people and professionals all around the world.”

Deputy Chief Education Officer in the Department of Education Dawson Ragunanan explained that the COVID19 pandemic has altered education systems the world over. “Our education system was transformed and let me say we cannot go back. You see we cannot go back to those days, because gone are the days when our clients, the students were digital immigrants now they are digital natives, we know that. As can be seen even when you give a baby a tablet, there is a natural inclination to gravitate towards these devices. Therefore, as leaders within the education system there is a fundamental need for us to be able to provide digital leadership at all levels, starting with digital literacy.”

Ambassador of Taiwan to Saint Lucia His Excellency Peter Chen highlighted the importance of such programmes to the education sector. “Capacity building of educators in information technology is one of the core values of the ICT for Education Development Project. There were more than 50 hours of training conducted in the year of 2020. These capacity building classes were designed to build our teachers’ ability to create teaching content and master the education tools but to better integrate teachers’ ICT skills into the teaching environment school principals play a pivotal role. The Digital Education Leadership Program is designed to better equip school leaders to facilitate the use of ICT resources in the field of education. I am proud to say that Saint Lucia is the first country to provide Digital Education Leadership Programme in the Caribbean.”

The 5-day Digital Education Leadership Programme targeted 45 primary and secondary school teachers.