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?