Are you digitally literate?

It cannot be denied that technology is running our lives, and this could be seen in a bigger scale in young people, where every second of their lives is immersed with technology. Because of this, new skills need to be developed in the classroom so as to keep up the pace of the new era.

Nicky Hockly (2013), in her article “What are they and why should we care?”, explains the importance of including the teaching of these skills in our language lessons, since what we teach should correlate to our students’ lives outside the classroom, and by doing so, making our lessons more relevant and appealing.

One of the subskills to be developed is “information literacies” which states the importance of finding and evaluating online information. It is imperative for students to distinguish reliable information from the plethora that we can find in the World Wide Web.

As an example of this, we analysed the webpage “British Council. Learn English Kids”. We think that it is a valuable webpage for teachers who need material to work with, since it offers suggestions and resources to make the lessons a very successful learning experience. As a drawback, not all of the resources can be downloaded.

For instance, in a Didactic Unit called "The human impact on the environment", we planned to use one of the GAMES in order to practice classifying trash in an interesting way, either in the computer lab or in the classroom with the projector.

Taking turns to play, students participate and help each other to identify, name and classify the elements in the picture. To assist pupils, we can guide them with questions, e.g.  Where do you place it? And also reading the labels aloud to help them.

As you can see, it is not impossible to use technology to grab pupils' attention and at the same time use it with educational purposes, but it is necessary to learn to distinguish which webpages are reliable and which are not.  

Hope it helps.

Source: Nicky Hockly (2013), Digital Literacies “What are they and why should we care?

Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives... A question of taste, interest or access?

The title of this post presents a very well-known dichotomy as regards the use of technology and learning processes nowadays. There is an interesting article written by Mark Prensky in 2001 which states the emphasis on how different students are now from the students 20 years ago (even though the article was written 15 years ago, it is still current). 

However, our opinion differs from the author’s, at least in our teaching contexts. It is true that there are schools where students have smart phones, computers, tablets, laptops, access to Internet at home and at school they also have computer labs, internet connection, interactive whiteboards in the classrooms,etc. Most of them have grown up with technology all around, and have the stereotypical characteristics of Digital Natives... but there are schools where the majority of students have no access to Internet or computer at home, they don’t have even smart phones, and attend schools where the budget goes to more urgent things than a computer lab (these are the characteristics of most of the state schools in Argentina). In this context, as you may imagine, we cannot say that people under 18 years of age are Digital Natives with all the characteristics that this term implies. 

But we totally agree with the need to empowering students' learning through technology. This means to make the learning experience richer and accesible, because society demands those characteristics from our students, no matter where they come from and how many hours they can spend in front of a screen in their lives. More than knowing Maths and Science, they need to know where the reliable sources come from and how to read and write in a computer (not in the traditional sense, but in this hypermedia full of images, videos, links, etc.). 

We, teachers (or future teachers), need to be updated, connected, and, more important than anything, not to be afraid of technology in the classroom. It is there already; let’s use it in favour of our teaching and learning! And where it isn't there, let's include it. It is not simple, but not impossible. It is part of our teaching to ALWAYS TRY NEW THINGS. So, depending on the context, let's give all our students a chance to try a different thing, and if something doesn't work, it's part of the experience. Digital immigrants usually have a different perspective.

If you like TED TALKS, here is a interesting one by Sree Sreenivasan about this topic. 

Hope you enjoy it! Leave a comment.

Source:  Digital Natives, Digital ImmigrantsBy Marc Prensky