Applied Digital Skills

Applied Digital Skills is Google's free digital skills curriculum for educators, delivered as video based lessons organised by topic. The catalogue covers computer science, college readiness, careers and first jobs, Google Workspace training, digital art and games, online safety and digital wellbeing, study skills, and search literacy, alongside seasonal and cultural collections.

Teaching digital skills through a project rather than through software instruction is what distinguishes this from a product tutorial. A lesson that has students plan an event or build a budget uses a spreadsheet as the means rather than the subject, which is both a better way to learn the tool and a defensible use of classroom time in a subject that is rarely on the timetable.

Being free without a school licence removes the barrier that stops most classroom technology. A teacher can use a lesson tomorrow without a purchase order, an IT review or an administrator's approval, which is the only route by which most classroom material is ever adopted.

Search literacy sitting in the same catalogue is worth noting. Teaching students to evaluate what they find is arguably the most durable skill here, and the least tied to any particular software, which is unusual for material published by a software company.