Abstract:

One of the innumerable social transformations derived from the global health emergency caused by the Covid-19 virus was confinement and social isolation, as part of the measures to protect the lives of citizens. The functioning of society was completely affected, including the educational field, which generates displacements of a considerable number of people daily, which, due to social contact, became an important risk group. The interruption of this routine, paralyzing face-to-face educational activities, was the safest strategy to reduce the spread of contagion.

The context of education, like all other sectors of society, had the need to hastily implement a distance learning system assisted by digital technologies for effective pedagogy.

It is in this environment where the lack of skills and abilities in the students was seen, having to adapt to these new conditions of online learning, as a result of the transfer of all educational activities to a virtual format. The online teaching space becomes the new educational environment, where students must put into operation all their cognitive, affective and motivational strategies, to self-regulate their learning in the most successful way possible.
School activities had to be restructured, to give continuity to the exercise of academic functions and transfer learning content, tasks and activities to the Internet.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in their multiple forms, apps, web, email, videos, took center stage, compromising the development of essential digital skills, for the management of different virtual platforms, such as Moodle, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc.

The objective of this study was to diagnose gaps in terms of the level of digital literacy and safe use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), to access knowledge, in the Ñuble region, Chile.

Evaluating the results for the aspects of:
1. Connectivity time,
2. Technical dimension,
3. Socio-emotional dimension and
4. Cognitive dimension.

The research considers the quantitative method, analyzing the objective reality, through a survey-questionnaire-type instrument, to collect quantifiable data and perform the corresponding statistical analysis. The results show that more than 50% of the participants can conduct themselves in the digital field, perform basic functions to surf the Internet and do school work, allocating significant usage time and connectivity to the mobile phone, exceeding 10 hours a day. to social networks more than to schooling. The conclusions focus on the importance of integrating, in all public educational establishments, sufficient digital literacy for students to function in a context that ensures the same quality and access to education for all students. In addition to strengthening aspects related to the use of software, to allow orderly information management, as well as the exploration of new tools for broader developments in the field of student training.

Keywords:

Digital gaps, Digital literacy, Emergency Remote Teaching, Virtual classroom.