Upon researching this framework, I really liked that its focus area is the educators' side and it made me recall my experiences from my own educators in the past.

There were a lot of times, especially in my school years that I felt that my educators had stopped updating their knowledge once they had obtained their degree, and the main indicator for that was the very standardized obsolete responses that I got to questions of mine during my learning. 

DigCompEdu evokes this idea for me that educators should not be considered as authorities with rigid knowledge but as active learners that also need time and resources to adapt to this digitization of society and education. The self-reflection opportunities that this framework offers I think also help educators become self-regulated learners themselves before they can train their students to do so.

In addition, while reading through the framework and reaching the Glossary, it gave me this idea of creating a Glossary for my own learning that I can enrich with new terms as I go through my readings. During a very short period of time I have come across so much terminology and new definitions, so having a tool as a reference for my studying that is tinkered for my needs sounds very useful. 

If I could categorize my skills in regards to a specific pillar of the DigCompEdu framework, that would mostly be the 2nd one which refers to Digital Resources. I think that I have a wide digital toolkit in mind, and even for the technologies that I'm not aware of,I believe that I have developed skills for quick and efficient adaptation to new digital tools as well as, searching efficiently for information.

During this course, I would like to get more insight on topics around the 5th pillar of DigCompEdu which refers to empowering learners, with the goal of being able to create personalized learning environments that are meaningful to people and can accommodate their individual needs. 

I found this framework particularly interesting because it addresses other components of education besides the direct teacher-student relationship that are highly significant and can truly determine the trajectory of the educational process, such as the role of policy makers, curriculum designers, people responsible for the teachers' well-being.

This reference to people of hierarchy-power brought to my mind my personal experiences of the situation in K-12 education (and higher education also) back in Greece and how truly definitive their decisions have been. I think the quote that describes the situation best is "everything changes, everything stays the same", because education is changing,a new curriculum was introduced that supposedly aligns with skills & competencies of the 21st century and promotes the extended use of ICT and digital tools, but all of the connections are missing. Is the process of legislation of educational policies involving a multi-disciplinary board of experts or is it b(i)ased on the current faces of the political scene? Are the policy makers collaborating with teachers, learning scientists? Are there institutional discussions happening? Is the curriculum contextualized according to the needs of state schools? 

These are rhetorical questions unfortunately, which leads me to draw the conclusion that even if teachers are fully trained to be digitally competent, and learners to keep up with the different tools, nothing can truly move forward in union if the general approach is not holistic. There is very little practical value, in my opinion, in separating and examining only one component of the educational process, because in the end it will be uncoordinated and incoherent with the rest.

Regarding the above, I would like to learn more about the educational policies in Finland as well as the current K-12 curriculum design strategies for Computer Science which is my main point of interest, but also for other disciplines.

Reading about the ISTE Computational Thinking Competencies was quite interesting to me because they are somehow connected to my experiences. In the initial part of my bachelor's thesis, I was analyzing the new Computer Science (CS) Curriculum that was pilot-implemented last year in Model-Experimental lower Secondary schools in Greece. During this analysis, targeting students' computational thinking was a main pillar of the new curriculum which further confirms the general direction that this digital transformation is taking us.

Upon reading and watching more videos about ISTE Standards for students, It made me think that many people still view Computer Science as a separate scientific field that some are involved and some aren't, but it really is a way of thinking overall. Algorithmic thinking and decomposition of problems are very useful skills for each person regardless. It also made me reflect on a book that I had read a long time ago, specifically this quote:

“Some of the biggest challenges faced by computers and human minds alike: how to manage finite space, finite time, limited attention, unknown unknowns, incomplete information, and an unforeseeable future; how to do so with grace and confidence; and how to do so in a community with others who are all simultaneously trying to do the same.”

― Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions 

I think this quote can be correlated to many different ISTE Standards for students, such as the Empowered Learner, Knowledge Constructor, Global Collaborator and the importance of preparing students for a digital future.

I would like for this course to raise my awareness on the ISTE standards both as a learner and as an educational designer. I would like to see how these standards are embedded into the activities that we implement in our workshops and practice on implementing them myself in my learning designs.

This was the most intriguing presentation for me out of all the above, partially because of this unusual comedic format but mainly because it focused on the notion-act-thinking of creativity.

I believe that a lot of times as people/engineers/educators/artists/scientists/researchers we get disheartened by the thought that everything has been done already by someone, and this can strip the joy of creativity, because it feels as if you cannot really create anything original and impactful anymore either for yourself either for others in educational settings. The video presenting this model evoked this validating thought of mine that there is no parthenogenesis in ideas, new ideas come from tweaking old ones and connecting them to your own personal perspective & experiences which are unique de facto. 

In my own experiences, I found myself aligned with the idea of TPCK and also fairly competent in two of the three pillars - content and technology. Before coming here, I had only studied pedagogy & learning sciences through my previous discipline which was Informatics, so this inevitably made me integrate technology into everything that I did. Therefore, I never separated it from pedagogy and content and learned to think in a more holistic approach, as the TPACK model introduces. I believe that the skills that I was (and still am) lacking are the ones around Pedagogy, which is the main reason for my studying in the LET program!

Lastly, during this course, I would like to explore the idea of playing with knowledge, of tweaking knobs in the sense of learning to think creatively about technologies and learning environments in formal and informal contexts.