Digital Creation

Brief Summary: Creating digital assets is central to successful academic and work life. A highly skilled individual in this competency can comfortably create a variety of accessible digital assets that relate to their academic assignments or career responsibilities. Examples include proficiency with Microsoft 365, presentations and videos. Creative expression can be defined as writing, brainstorming, prototyping and art. These expressions apply to all fields of work or study. 

Learners with proficient skills in digital creation should be able to: 

  • Choose the appropriate tool to create desired result, for example, using Excel to create a spreadsheet or using Adobe Premiere to create a video 
  • Understand Microsoft 365 fundamentals, like Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel 
  • Implement digital accessibility best practices, like using headings in documents, adding alt text to images and using sufficient color contrast with text 
  • Create presentations in tools like PowerPoint, Keynote, Adobe Premiere or other presentation mediums 
  • Leverage technology to pursue creative endeavors for personal or professional use 

Market/Employer Trends: Employers indicate value in skills related to leveraging technology and software to complement or even drive presentations. They are seeing a skill gap in basic use of common tools for creation and presentation that are key to providing information or telling an important story. They value when an employee is open-minded to emerging technologies and able to navigate across tools to create material in new mediums. 

 

Self-Evaluation: 

Key questions for reflection: 

  • How often do you create using the same medium?  
  • Are you equally comfortable creating in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel?  
  • Are you confident stretching into new mediums?  
  • Are you able to create a vision in your mind and bring it to fruition digitally?  

Strong digital skills in this area could appear as: 

  • Embedding basic functions into an Excel spreadsheet 
  • Using heading styles withing Word and PowerPoint to enhance digital accessibility 
  • Creating a virtual portfolio to highlight your professional experience using your favorite tool 
  • Using Adobe Creative Cloud to develop wireframes for a mobile app idea 
  • Tell a story using technology in a chosen medium. A chosen medium could be based on skills or interest and range from writing a document in Word to producing a podcast 

 

Ways to Upskill: 

Ready to grow your strength in this competency? Try: 

 

Educator Tips to Support Digital Skills:

  • Develop assignments that allow students to create an asset using a medium of their choice. For example, some students may create a podcast and others may write a reflection 
  • Link to resources or tutorials for apps when students are required to use them for an assignment 
  • Encourage students to keep record of relevant class projects to use in resumes and online portfolios for future use