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