Digital literacies in the language classroom

Hockly defined Digital Literacy as “our ability to effectively make use of the technologies at our disposal.” As future teachers, having this competence is highly important when designing digital materials, since it helps us to evaluate if the sources are reliable. Moreover, the development of digital skills allows us to decide which are the best sources to create materials that are relevant for our students.

In order to provide you with an example on how to assess webpages, here is a brief analysis of the site: "Discovery Education: Puzzlemaker". After taking into consideration different aspects such as, reliability, objectivity, clarity, currency and accessibility, we conclude that:  It is a valuable source since we can create the material with the topic and vocabulary we choose. The games offered by the webpage, which are very popular among children, teenagers and adults, are easy to design in this site. As we provide the words or phrases, we are able to manipulate the difficulty of the task. Furthermore, it only took some minutes to create a nice and enjoyable activity.

We used the site mentioned above to create a puzzle in the context of a project about climate change and human impact on the environment.

The following task is part of a lesson plan in which students are given the opportunity to review the new vocabulary. For this reason, we designed a crossword in which pupils have to fill in the sentences with the missing words and then complete the crossword. The phrases that appear in the following puzzle are related to "solutions to save the planet” that students have seen in previous lessons. 

Hope you like the puzzle and try using the site to create your own material!

References 
- Nicky Hockly (2013) "Digital literacies: What are they and why should we care?" . Retrieved from http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/digital-literacies-what-are-they-why-should-we-care
- Discovery Education:Puzzlemaker

Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives controversy

Prensky coined these two terms to distinguish people born before and during the Digital era.  In his own words “Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology…Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet”. But, what about the rest who were not born in the digital world? According to Prensky, you have to be on one side or the other. i.e, if you did not have access to technology since birth, then you are a Digital Immigrant.

Retrieved from https://larrycuban.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/keefe.jpg

Nowadays, we are facing a dichotomy whether Digital Native students should learn the old ways, or Digital Immigrant educators learn the new. This view has generated a great deal of heated debate in the educational context, since many people believe that digital immigrants are the ones that should adapt to the natives. Unfortunately, many teachers still prefer dealing with something familiar rather than trying something new and keeping up-dated with the Digital natives. The same happens with the natives who are reluctant to learn in the traditional fashion.

For this reason, we do not agree with Prensky’s distinction as we consider that it is necessary to strike a balance between the different perspectives. Both generations have something to offer to one another and they can profit from that. Not only do we believe that it is necessary for digital immigrants to move forwards, but also it is important that Digital Natives respect and try to deal with classroom situations which do not include technologies or things that are familiar to them. Besides, there are other aspects to consider, such as, schools contexts that may lack the basic technological facilities.

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