Information and Digital literacies

 Technological advance is a fact and we, as future teachers of the language, cannot stay behind.  

 As regards Digital literacies, they are known as our ability to make use of the technologies that surround the mass media. With the globalization, they begin to be a fundamental skill not only for everyday life but also for the language classroom.  

 Teachers, as Nickly Hockly suggests, should foster digital skills “in parallel with teaching English” due to the fact that what students learn in school is not similar to what they do in their online lives.

 Considering the integration of digital literacies into ELT classrooms, their development could be divided into four main areas: Those with a focus on language, on connections, on information, and on (re)design.

 One of those main areas deals with the ability to find and evaluate the information which is provided by the Internet.  As an example, we analysed the site “Learn English”, which provides free content for learning and teaching English, and fulfils a great number of criteria for evaluating web resources to use in the classroom.

 One advantage of this webpage is that the information is presented clearly, which is really important if we want to use it with the students. For this reason, teachers can use this webpage to do online activities, either in the lesson or as homework.

 In fact, we used this webpage in a unit plan we have designed. After presenting vocabulary about food and recycling and doing a wordsearch, the students are going to do the online activity which consists on dragging each word to the correct box in order to practise all the new vocabulary (presented in the image below).  

On the webpage they will read the following instruction and activity.

“We can recycle glass, paper, plastic and metal. We can also put left-over food into our compost to use in a garden. Can you put the rubbish in the correct recycle bin?”

 What is more, as “Learn English” is run by the British Council, its reliability, purpose and objectivity are explicitly stated. Indeed, we came to the conclusion that it is a valuable resource for getting language materials to every learner and teacher who wants to improve their ability in the English language.

Sources:

• Hockly, N. (n.d.). Digital literacies: What are they and why should we care? Retrieved July 05, 2016, from https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/digital-literacies-what-are-they-why-should-we-care
• Recycling. (n.d.). Retrieved July 05, 2016, from http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/word-games/recycling
• Worksheet provided by the teacher: "Evaluating web sites: Criteria for the classroom". 

Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants

A thought-provoking issue in education is the one in connection to Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. With our classmates we have read an article by Marc Prensky (2001) and today we want to share part of our discussions about and reflections in relation to it. The main idea that the author presents in the article is that Digital Natives -those who have grown up with digital technologies- constitute a new generation of students who “think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors” (2001: 1). As a consequence, teachers, most of whom are considered Digital Immigrants, (since they were not born into the digital world but have adapted many aspects of new technology), speak a language totally different from that of their students, establishing a conflicting “discontinuity”, in Prensky’s words.
Along the article, we found certain statements we don’t entirely agree with; for example, when the author expresses: “The single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language” (2001:2), in our opinion there are other issues of great importance that teachers and schools have to face day by day (for instance, building problems, racism, bullying, physical and psychological violence, etc.). Actually, with the digital era, students get involved with declassified information that could be inappropriate for their age, or the content is just not ‘funny’ as they think. In that case, we as future teachers have to be prepared to face these kinds of difficult situations and, we think, it could be less demanding if we teach them to speak the new language so as to facilitate the communication.
Moreover, we reflected about the following statement: "A frequent objection I hear from Digital Immigrant educators is 'this approach is a great for facts, but it wouldn't work for my subject.' Nonsense. This is just rationalization and lack of imagination" (2001: 6). We agree with it to a certain extent, since we consider that probably one of the reasons why teachers don’t try new ways of teaching is the lack of imagination. However, there are other reasons that are more “common” or frequent, and here is where we agree to Prensky’s idea when he says: "It's just 'dumb' (and lazy) of educators- not to mention ineffective- to presume that (despite their traditions) the Digital Immigrant way is the only way to teach, and that the Digital Natives 'language' is not as capable as their own of encompassing any and every idea" (2001: 6) since we think one of the main reasons for teaching in the old way is the lack of willingness from the part of the teachers and their fear of wasting time in designing and implementing new ideas in their classrooms.
Hope these reflections can be of interest and we strongly recommend reading the article, since it shows a current problematic issue as regards education and of great importance in EFL teaching contexts.

Resource: Prensky, M. (n.d.). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Retrieved July, 2016, from https://edorigami.wikispaces.com/file/view/PRENSKY%20-%20DIGITAL%20NATIVES%20AND%20IMMIGRANTS%201.PDF