Laying the Foundations for a Digital Literacy Program in the Galapagos Islands

Digital Literacy is an enabler that allows individuals and communities the ability to create, access, and share knowledge through digital means. These skills could be leveraged to produce economic growth through new employment and career opportunities. Ultimately this Digital Literacy knowledge can leading to enhanced quality of life for the community members. The main challenges to implementing Digital Literacy programs include teachers’ competencies, skills, and motivation to use digital technologies as well as their access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) infrastructure. This paper presents a group of initiatives focused on providing digital technologies as well as capacity building for teachers to improve the quality of education they deliver to their students. These efforts serve to prepare the foundations of a Digital Literacy program for the Galapagos Islands. We have established a community Intranet with educational resources loaded on servers that are shared between schools. We have delivered a number of workshops to teachers and students on Digital Literacy topics. An overview of the different projects, experiences, and future work will be presented.