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".