thank you so much paul um hello everybody uh welcome lovely to see so many people from all over the world a big thank you of course a big thank you to the british council for uh inviting me to give this webinar it's a real privilege and pleasure to be working with so many of you you know i've been teaching online fully online since 1997 long before this kind of video conferencing was available so it's absolutely it still strikes me as incredible that there are so many of us from so many countries here together and really you know relatively easily these days so much more accessible than it used to be okay so um as you know the talk is going to look at digital literacies we'll talk about what those are in a minute but first i'd like to reintroduce myself um paul mentioned that i've written a few books and indeed i have um because it's taken me so many years to write them i like to put them there on the screen just to show you uh there's a new one coming out um next year the 50 essentials on the right there and also as paul said the second edition of digital literacies so digital literacies is something that i'm particularly interested in and have been for many many years apart from my professional life though i thought i'd tell you a little bit about myself personally before we start these are four flags from four countries and these are countries that are significant in some way in my life so let's see if you recognize these flags i'll just pull up the chat box number one on the top right i can see a couple of people there pauline says yes it's yeah number one number one is south africa absolutely yes you may be able to tell that i have a bit of a south african accent so south africa is important to me because that is where i was born and brought up how about flag number two is exactly spain yep people have recognized that one yep spain is where i live at the moment i'm just outside barcelona coincidentally i'm just down the road from paul actually how about flag number three flag number three absolutely yup great britain yes britain and i lived in the uk for uh let me see six years where i did my first degree um i've spent three years in london and three years in brighton so you'll see that there's a bit of a theme there in terms of the sea i've always lived near the sea cape town south africa near the sea i lived near barcelona near the sea uh in the uk i lived in brighton which is near the sea and then the fourth country what is the fourth country exactly australia yeah okay so i haven't lived in australia i've been several times but you know i always wanted to live in australia i don't know if we have any australians actually here with us today but yes an absolutely a beautiful country and one that's very dear to my heart and i'm going to start off with a few things about australia to see what you may know about it so australia as you know has lots of weird and wonderful animals here are six statements about australian animals and you just need to decide how many are false so there are six in total how many of those six are false put the number in the chat box so if you think one of these is false you put number one if you think two of these are false write two all right so chia being says two you think two are false what about the rest of you how many are false we've got zero three two none all right so we're between zero and three at the moment all right only three out of six i mean when you read them they do all sound a bit strange don't they so i'm surprised you're only saying three but that's great okay i'm gonna come back to these statements in a little while when i read through this again i realize there's a bit of a scatological tone to all of these uh statements but there is a reason that i'm sharing these with you and i'm going to come back to to those statements a bit later but before i do uh well i have a question for you and that is what are digital literacies could you put a couple of keywords or a definition in the chat box what do you think digital literacies are you don't need to write a whole definition just some keywords would do what are they i'll pause social media using technology uh being safe in the digital world thank you yes these are coming up very fast using tools uh using gadgets ict people have got technologies being mentioned by quite a few people technology and education all right well here's a definition that i quite like this is from the latest edition of our book digital literacies so you'll see that the definition goes a little bit beyond just technology the individual technological and social skills that are needed to interpret manage share and create meaning through a range of digital channels so often when we hear the word digital literacies we tend to think you know technology machines tools tech it's far more than that it involves interaction the social uses of technology and also being able to use a range of technologies for creation and communication so it's a fairly broad term it's an umbrella term it's quite difficult to actually pin it down it can sound a little too vague for comfort now um to try and give a little more clarity to this term my co-writers gavin dudeny and mark peegram and i came up with a kind of a framework which we think helps um define in with a little bit more detail exactly what we mean by digital literacy so i'm going to just very quickly share this framework with you i'm not going to go through all of this in detail right i don't want to spend too long on the theory i'd like to get to the practical activities that you could do with your students but just so that we do have a framework to understand this very broad term the first kind of area that we identify is this idea of communicating so we're using technology within communication and the red words in the circle are different what we might call sub-literacies so within the umbrella term digital literacies we have code literacy mobile literacy print literacy of course print literacy is something that we've always had right print literacy is being able to read and to write it's one of the most basic literacies that are taught in schools but print literacy these days includes digital communication so it might include understanding memes for example not just reading online newspapers and things like that it also means understanding multimedia as a form of print literacy or sound and word or image and word um this one here hypertext literacy i think this is an interesting one to illustrate perhaps exactly what i mean by digital matrices because we all know what hypertext is right if you think of a wikipedia entry right you'll have your text on the page and then you'll have those blue words which are hyperlinks hypertext is online text that includes hyperlink great now what does it mean to be able to create hypertext it's not that difficult is it when you think about it it's not difficult to create digital text you could do it in a word document you could do it in a blog entry and if you want to create hyperlinks it's not difficult to do that you just select your word you insert a link and then when you click on it it's going to take you out to another website perhaps so the actual technical skills involved in creating hyper hypertext are not complex we can all do them very easily we have these skills but that's not the only thing involved in creating hypertext we need to think about how many hyperlinks we have in a document so if we go back to our wikipedia entry imagine you're looking at a page and you're looking at a paragraph and in that paragraph let's say there are 40 words and 20 of those words are hyperlinks what is the effect of that on the reader research has actually shown that it makes it very very difficult to read when something is over hyperlinked because you're kind of making these very fast subconscious decisions should i click on it shouldn't i where does it go to or and i'm not going to click i'm going to carry on and at the end of the day it's actually very difficult to retain the information in hypertext especially if there's a lot of hyperlinks within it so if we go back to our idea of digital literacies hypertext literacy will include okay one i know how to create my hyperlinks but two how many hyperlinks should i include and what should i link to because if i over hyperlink i'm making the experience of reading that much more difficult for the reader there's also that you know who i link to and what i link to is that of value and another effect of over hyperlinking is that i look like i don't really know what i'm talking about if i have to hyperlink everything i'm talking about well it just sort of starts to lose you lose credibility as an author so these are perhaps the kind of the the communication or social area that surrounds uh digital literacies it's not just creating hypertext okay i hope that's illustrated a little bit what we mean by digital literacies we go beyond the technology with digital literacies so communicating is our first area in our in our framework our second is this idea of informing so getting information across and of course these are all very obvious right search literacy we need to know how to search for stuff online for example in google but again if we go back to this idea of social plus technology it's not difficult to type your search term into google or whatever your search engine is but what about the fact that you're getting back results that have been tailored to you depending on your previous use of let's take google as an example if i search for you know good restaurants in barcelona i might get slightly different results to pull because our user patterns are different we need to be aware of that we're not all getting the same you know results when when we're searching and there are alternatives to search engines like google which are capturing all of your user information there are search engines that don't save any of your um information i don't know whether anybody knows any of these search engines the ones that don't track your every move one of the best ones is called duck duck go there we go farazad has put that in there duckduckgo is one of the best ones so if you're uncomfortable about google you know collecting basically everything that's available about your life you might want to change search engines filtering is another form of literacy so you know sorting through that massive wave of information that's thrown at you every day and there's a couple of very nice terms for this and infoglut is one of them data smog i like that so finding your way through this data smog is another important digital literacy uh tagging and hashtag literacy and information and data literacy are again essential the ones in this particular circle i think are absolutely key and i'm going to come back to some of these in a minute just to carry on though with the framework our third area is this idea of collaboration and of course you know with the internet that's what we do most these days so we have a number of literacies within that area of collaboration and i don't want to get bogged down in these as i say that i've got a book this thick on it and i don't have time to go through all of them but if you're interested you can find them online to find online and then this last idea this idea of creation and design and redesign through a couple of literacies such as remix which i will talk about um a little later today so there you go this is just a framework it's a construct it's a way of trying to categorize um you know these things within this very uh vague umbrella term of digital literacies and that's the framework we use now the next question is well you know who cares why do we want to be digitally literate and i think howard reingold here has a really good comment this idea of keeping up with technologies is just not possible it's about the literacies so once you learn to use a certain blog tool you're most likely going to know how to use the next one that comes along right nobody can ever keep up with the technologies there's too much change there's too much going on for me one of the most important skills if we can call it about being digitally literate literate and keeping up is that you'll find the answer online if you don't know how to use it to a new technology search online there's going to be a tutorial there's going to be screenshots there's going to be a walk through you know you can teach yourself a second quote about why digital literacies are important this one from my co-author mark piegram give you a second to read that i think mark's comment is really pertinent because it's this idea of learning that's relevant to our students we're making the learning more relevant more interesting and we're enriching it by bringing an element of digital literacies into our main job which is of course language teaching right we're there to teach language but we can fairly easily um marry that with a focus on digital literacies and i'm going to show you how in a minute so there you go that's a kind of a framework for understanding digital literacies and a very quick summary of why they are important now i'd like to go back to australia for a minute if we do have any australians or people who've been to australia i don't know whether you're familiar with this particular animal quite rare in australia commonly called the drop bear but it's called the vilarcus plummetus i'm going to show you a photo of it in a minute here it is so basically a koala with fangs very sharp teeth and there's a very interesting article there on the left from the australian geographic about how the drop bear likes to prey on tourists and apparently you probably can't read the subtitle there but it says that these if you have an australian accent you're unlikely to be attacked by this particular by the drop bear so there you go we're all in trouble unless we have australian accents and if you look on the right here there's a number of uh videos these ones are all from youtube that give information about this terrifying creature okay so as you've probably realized this is not true it's a kind of a national joke that all australians seem to enjoy they seem to enjoy you know perpetuating this myth of the drop bear this is a great activity to do with students to get them to look at the the image i showed before to show them the australian geographic which looks quite convincing doesn't it it almost looks like the national geographic you can get them to search for videos and they will find evidence in inverted commerce evidence of the drop bear so it's quite a quite a nice hoax even though it is quite obviously sort of silly patricia you can change your accent to sound like an australian you'll be safe then good okay so let's go back to our statements from the beginning right and you'll see that number three number four sorry number four is the is the drop there so number four is most definitely false and in fact all of the rest of them are true would you believe they are they are all true so you can see how we can work with students using an activity like this we could start by giving them a series of statements these six statements and then asking them to research each of these statements to decide whether they're true or false and then get the class back together and they have to say whether each one is true or false and where they found the evidence from and as it turns out it's number four that's false okay before we go on to that um this is really an information uh an example of information literacy basic basic information literacy and information literacy is the most important i think of all of them being able to figure out what's true what's false what your sources are online before we look at some of the other literacies though think about yourself and on a scale of one to four how digitally literate are you so number one would be low and number four would be high and paul has just pulled up a poll which you should be able to see so rather than putting it in the chat if you could complete the poll that means we'll be able to see the results it's very difficult to to follow in the chat otherwise paul i don't know if you can actually broadcast the results at the same time or do we have to wait a lot of people saying two three yeah generally you have to sort of wait and then i'll sort of broadcast it in a minute okay okay okay okay there we go okay so most people are saying three which is actually fairly high yeah fantastic good yeah yeah well 57 percent three two and three uh-huh that's interesting you know i've seen a real change in teachers um self-perceptions of their digital literacies over the years and i think also since covert where we all got very very quickly put online uh teachers have skilled up uh quite significantly really in the last 18 months so three is pretty high for an average good good stuff okay um here's a second poll which is almost identical here it is but this time i want you to think how digitally literate your students are again one would be very low and four would be pretty pretty high so thinking of your students could you do this again in the poll if you could see it just so that we could get an overview much more easily with so many of us i'll just pause for a second should be able to see the poll i can see people are still in the chat so i'm getting an idea here it seems to be quite mixed all right paul shall we broadcast the results and see what we've got all right so slight we've got two we've got 40 saying two for their students uh interesting so your students are a little less digitally literate than you that that is interesting when i've done this before with teachers it's almost invariably the other way around that teachers tend to think that their students are more digitally literate especially if they're teaching younger students but it's interesting that you think you know that yours are are less digitally literate thank you for doing that that's extremely interesting okay um so i just want to very quickly summarize the results of an interesting study that was carried out in 2013. now admittedly this was a long time ago but it was carried out with 60 000 students who were age 13 to 14 which is about grade uh what is that grades eight eight i think um so 60 000 students in 3 300 schools across 21 countries so a really huge study into digital literacies the study was trying to see how digitally literate these this age group 13 to 14 are across this really huge you know sample sample population so there were 60 000 students as i said and there were also 25 000 teachers and school principals and ict coordinators involved in this study it was interestingly designed because instead of getting students to do what i just did with you which is not very reliable the students had to carry out a practical task that would actually show whether they were digitally literate or not and there were four tasks and there the tasks were randomly assigned to students so there were a range of these and again each task was scored from one to four so one would be the lowest literacy that was um exhibited to four which would be the highest literacy where do you think the majority were what level i mean you've just told me your level your level of students is about two but in this study of sixty thousand students where do you think the average was between one and four one the lowest for the highest all right we've got some threes we've got some twos fours two's okay we've got pretty much every number there all right well interestingly the majority so 81 of these 60 60 000 students was between levels one and three so not level four and then the majority within that were at number two which quite a few of you have identified and actually matches exactly what you just said about your own students yeah so students are not that digitally literate this was an interesting study as well carried out more recently 2016. it was you may even have heard of it because it became it was i saw it in newspapers i heard about it on the radio at the time it was carried out by um weinberg at all from stanford university in the usa and they looked specifically at the context in the u.s where you would expect students to be slightly more digitally literate because they have more access right to to technology so in this case they looked at middle school and high school and university students across 12 states within the usa and in total they got just under 8 000 students involved in the study what they found was interesting and that was as the headline there says that the students were really not very good at spotting what was true and what was not online so most likely they would have believed all of the stuff about the drop bear that i just told you they didn't use the drop bear by the way in the study but from the results it seems that and they tend to believe what they see online what's interesting as well is that if there is an image and especially if there is a video involved then these students believed it more if it was just text based they sort of believed it but if it was backed up by images or by video then then they tended to believe it more so you'll see the dropbear for example has some images and it also has some videos i guess they would have would have really fallen for that one that's an interesting thing and it has some interesting repercussions for this wave of kind of fake news that seems to be washing over the internet at the moment okay so two studies that are worth worth looking at i think the lesson to be learned here for students is that you need to triangulate and verify your sources in other words look at at least three different sources and see where they're coming from so the australian geographic who are these people who are they what is this publication well of course it's a fake publication so being able to question a little bit what you're seeing online is absolutely essential it's the first step in information literacy and has become you know i think one of the most pressing issues of our time i don't think i exaggerate when we look at what's happening online at the moment um i want to just quickly talk about covert because there has been so much misinformation about it over the last 18 months and it's a really interesting case study of just how um information literacy is is essential in this day and age you probably had experiences of this yourself during the covet time i just want to share three pieces of information from various online sources on the top right hand side is a whatsapp audio message now this is my personal whatsapp account and this is from a friend of mine who lives near me here in in spain uh she sent me you can see here this is a forwarded audio message so obviously it's not her she's sending me an audio message from somewhere else and i clicked on this audio message and listened to it and it was a person talking about how it said something like you know a doctor who a doctor in south korea has said they have found that if you want to know if you have covert you just need to try and hold your breath for i think it was like 30 seconds or something if you don't cough uh or it doesn't hurt in any way then you don't have covert all right and of course when you hear that you immediately want to hold your breath just to check it turned out to be uh not true and it was circulated on social media so through personal social media accounts very very widely you may have received that exact message yourself apparently it got all over the world if you did hear that one just put yes in the chat box by the way so that was that was an interesting one but that was you know when i listened to it i thought yeah really who is this person speaking and who is the so-called doctor in south korea it just sounded a little weird i didn't believe it necessarily although i couldn't help holding my breath for those 30 seconds but i thought yeah right okay probably not true i didn't pass it on the second one though is that tweet there on the left hand side now this guy here olivier he's a he's the french he was the french health minister at the time on the 14th of march 2020 and he uh i'll just quickly translate it in case you don't speak french she says taking anti-inflammatories ibuprofen cortisone could be an aggravating factor in the infection talking about covet right um in case of fever take paracetamol if you're already taking anti-inflammatories or if you're doubtful or in worried about it get some advice from your doctor so this is the french minister of health i mean pretty much everybody believed that one it turned out not to be true though interestingly there was no scientific evidence for this i've put a little link just underneath here because subsequently a study was done it appeared in several newspapers saying you know this is this is not true folks um but the study was actually done by a couple of uh students at a university here in in barcelona coincidentally uh looking into where this came from how did how did it come to the point where the french minister of health is tweeting something that's not true and it started as one of these fake voice notes pretty much like the one that i received in germany and then it spread and as soon as it was given this kind of high profile attention and people of course believed the health minister uh suddenly it was everywhere so it was reported on in newspapers as well as fact with people not having checked whether uh whether it was true or not so a real eye-opener that one i think then the one on the right there uh you may have heard that one too when it when it happened um that apparently amazon was not going to be delivering your pizza anymore and the whole planet went into meltdown so you might have might have heard about that but it wasn't true either it was one of those fake pieces of fake news again being shared very widely via via social media okay here are another couple that i quite like so you probably heard about this one as well the toilet paper rush in the early days of lockdown and there we have a costco warehouse and then there was this you can read this on the right here but basically that uh your toilet paper should be sent back because it was contaminated with covert and so on so here again obviously this is not true but it was again passed around uh via social media people passing on a lot of this fake stuff and in those early days people were very confused by all of this um in in yes i will try to speak a little bit more slowly apologies i get a bit carried away here are some statements based on those images that i just shared with you the first one relates to that audio message that i received the second one is that toilet paper hoax from costco this one we haven't looked at but it was reported as a real event and then we have the fourth one which is the french minister's uh statement via twitter and then the fifth one uh about the amazon deliveries and all of these are false so again you can see how you can turn this into a classroom activity quite easily you start with a series of statements and then you get your students to research and find out whether they were true or not the french ministers one is a very interesting case because it was widely reported as true at the time all right this is a fantastic site to send people to to check out these rumors and false misinformation disinformation that is circulating online you can get some statements from here yourself and then get students in pairs to each take a statement and then research uh you know where it comes from whether it's true whether it's not true so getting this kind of you know critical use of online information is absolutely essential of course we're exposing english students to english reading practice at the same time so it's a very valid language learning activity this graphic was shared by the who the world health organization in 2020 so you can see how the audio that i was sent really falls into this this kind of pattern so as teachers we can get our students to look at and check misinformation but we can also teach them the strategies to avoid passing on misinformation so once you've checked your sources you've verified where it comes from then you don't pass on fake news or misinformation this is an important digital literacies not just spotting it but having the kinds of social behaviors that stop this kind of sometimes dangerous information okay while we're talking about covid uh you probably got lots of fabulous memes during that time and i just wanted to to share three that i received on my own social media which just made me laugh so the top left one there maybe laugh um the second the other two are in spanish from spanish friends and here they are translated those just made me laugh so much at the time so of course another activity is getting memes from students own language and then getting them to translate they can share their favorite means okay what we've been looking at then really over the last few activities is information literacy as i said before absolutely essential the most important literacy lends itself very very easily to english language classes you know reading listening researching sharing speaking you can easily fit it into your english language classes before we finish though i want to take a very quick look at remix remix literacy is my favorite it's a very very creative one and to me one of the best ways in to remix literacy is through memes so this meme i'm sure you recognize it it's one of the most famous memes of all time it's been around for a very very long time if you're familiar with the history behind this image please just type a few key words into the chat if you know where the image comes from what country what historical period just put it in the in the chat there yes world war ii britain absolutely it was a poster that was um was created by the british government during the second world war it was never put up it was never um what's the word exhibited publicly but then in the early 2000s a couple of copies of this poster were found in the north of england and they were um they were put in the window of a book shop people quite liked it and then merchandise started to appear so t-shirts with this image and these words or coffee cups started to appear there was something about it that people liked in the 2000s even though it was in a different historical period now so that happened for a while it started to appear online people shared it online as an image and then this happened this was well the first remix of the original meme that has been traced which is wonderful and of course you can see how this is a remix it takes the original elements and it mixes them up to create something new we have the same lettering the same number of words the crown is upside down we have a monochrome background and this then created a huge amount of memes on the same theme here are some of my favorites i'll give you a minute to look at them aren't those wonderful now if you look at these memes some of them are really quite complex they require quite a lot of cultural and historical knowledge look at the one on the top left this is referring to an entire political system is talking about communism a political economic system and the one next to it is also referring to an entire political economic system right it's talking about capitalism so these memes often are quite complex i mean you need to have some kind of historical understanding especially what the one on the left to recognize for example the icon some of them are obviously much simpler keep calm and blog on or keep calm and call batman reference to cultural cultural popular culture and this one on the right i quite like the keep calm and fake a british accent and my question to you is why why a british accent this is an interesting one why bridgette why not a french accent or italian accent or a new zealand accent why why a british accent any ideas zorran says the british are calm yeah interesting the queen's english and they've got it together well i think anybody in a petrol queue this week would disagree stiff upper lip yeah sophia there she says stiff upper lip there are many ways to interpret this meme actually and you're all coming up with all different ideas which are equally valid but my personal interpretation is the same as sophia's that it's uh the british accent the british are considered to be you know very stoic in the face of adversity they don't get you know they don't panic they're always calm and that's why that's how i understand it but there are many many ways you can interpret this so it's an interesting discussion to have with students here as well there are all sorts of cultural assumptions behind memes that are a good road into talking about culture and intercultural stuff okay i'm just going to very quickly share with you another meme this is not for students this is a well-known meme that teachers love and you may have seen this one before it's the said no teacher ever meme and again it follows a certain pattern we have a statement and then the the statement is sort of the opposite said no teacher ever undermines the statement so here are some of my favorites of this these are old exactly elisa but they are still hilarious i'll let you read those i think these have been around for at least eight years i'm sure you all identify with many of these so i wouldn't use this with with uh with students but in teacher training yeah it's a good laugh so there you go i mean memes so of course the next stage would be to get your students to create a keep calm meme or you know your teacher trainees to create and said no teacher ever mean there are many free meme creator websites here they are you can use some of them on your mobile phone incredibly easy to use so you may want to check those okay i'd like to just finish with some words by henry jenkins and he says what students do in their online lives has nothing to do with the things they are learning in school and what they are learning in school has little or nothing of value to contribute to who they are once the bell rings those are very very harsh words worth keeping in mind is that he said this in 2009 so henry jenkins is an educationalist teacher but also works with educational technology i think things are shifting it's been slow covert has definitely had a huge impact in terms of putting technology you know on the map not just online teaching but the fact that technology can support learning if it's used well and judiciously judiciously it can support learning so things are changing but i would argue that bringing digital literacies into your english language teaching is another way to make your students enjoy your classes more and also make those classes so much more relevant to the world outside of your classroom we do have a few minutes left for q a and i think paul you're going to moderate that oh um i don't know put the mime creator work websites back on there we go great brilliant thank you nikki i really enjoyed that i'm so good you're welcome thank you paul i think everyone else looking at the comments enjoyed that as well so yeah i mean a lot to sort of cram into 45 minutes so obviously um you know i suppose say a whistle top stop tour of digital literacies but certainly kind of them is nice that you sort of focused on some of the key elements there um a couple of things that were really interesting actually for me firstly the one with the poll with i think surprised you as well actually the idea that you know teachers sort of mark themselves around sort of three or the majority mark themselves as a three in terms of digital industries but the students um less so i wonder if that's the couple of things possibly covered um and teaching these students online and realizing that perhaps they're not quite as digitally literate as as we might have thought previously and also age group has as well i guess and i guess it's that we can't sort of see what age groups people are teaching there but maybe i would imagine it's mostly sort of secondary where you would expect i think students to to be more digitally literate but then i guess i was sort of thinking and sort of trying to equate it with my teaching which i don't do now but the idea you know that if you're using technology in the classroom and often a student will come along and fix it for you because they know how it works but that doesn't really equate to being digitally literate does it so it's exactly yeah yeah i think you're right that's that's an important point i mean the idea that we think that our younger students are somehow more digitally illiterate they you know they're all they're they've all got the equivalent of a phd in tick tock or in instagram right but you know show them something online or tell them to go and look at the drop bear and they're going to believe it they don't have the critical skills or the tools to be able to look at whether it's true or not so this this idea that the younger students are the more digitally literate they are is a fallacy it's i think it's understanding digital literacies as being able to use technology and that's not what it's about it's got that social critical communicative angle that youngest in so often not so not so proficient at yeah no absolutely i mean you know i've yeah you know i have a sort of 17 year old nearly 17 year old son who spends most of his time looking at his phone but you know that's the youtube videos or whatever but it doesn't necessarily mean you'd be able to spot fake news and i'm sure if i showed him the drop there he would think twice about going to australia if that's what he was planning to do you know because he didn't believe it so it's you know it's interesting the other thing i thought was fascinating actually and and really important and sort of brought home the idea of this being able to understand and um discern between fake and real news was that the sort of the flowchart the who the world health organization flowchart where that sort of touch points where someone doesn't share it or someone you know i thought was you know really powerful and just shows the importance of of helping students to to understand uh yeah go back to it um well anyway but yeah the the importance there of being able to kind of help students in in that area um i guess i mean i just sort of wonder maybe it's a question for people in the chat as well but the idea that something like that where you have a curriculum and you have to teach and there are certain things that you have to do for exams how how do maybe some advice from you nikki but also a question to the participants how do you if you do manage to kind of bring in an element of focus on digital literacies when there is such a sort of a dense curriculum perhaps to get through in order to to pass an exam yes yeah it's true i mean there's two there's two ways to approach this and the whole book for example digital literacies you could either use that as a syllabus and there have been a couple of research projects that have done this since the first the first edition was published but the case of most teachers in the world as you say is that you have an externally imposed syllabus right or curriculum it'll be through the education department or your school or your course book but it's actually not difficult to slot an element of digital literacies always into your course book so if you have uh for example a reading let's say you have your unit on travel right i mean find me a course book that doesn't have a unit on travel at every level all the way up it's not difficult to slip in some true false sentences there as a little warmer activity so you know animals around the world you could use some of my six statements there take some of those include the drop bear and then do some online research and then get students reporting back so you could do that in class if you have access to all students have access to technology but if not for homework so in pairs they need to research one statement and then come back and tell everybody if it's true or false and how they know um so those are you know helping them develop search skills and critical literacy skills the whole thing um yeah okay um i miss related that is a question from bella around the role of digital literacy on students learning performance um i guess when you sort of answered that really there i think with that question the last question i see there um he's talking about student performance yes it's not difficult for us i think to integrate some of the ideas i've shown you into our normal teaching for communicative language teachers then we do reading you know writing listening speaking it's pretty easy to do um but performance as as bilal mentioned uh performance is often um it's assessed through exams right if we are integrating an element of digital literacies into our classes i think we need to re-look at assessment a little bit so if you're teaching your students to be you know check their sources online and maybe they're writing blog posts and they're not over hyperlinking to go back to that first example they're being careful about the hyperlinks that they put into their blog post they're using images that are and creative commons licensed so they're learning about copyright and the use of images and you know quoting your sources all of that stuff is happening then sure we can assess their performance on what they've written right we can look at the language and say oh look at all those mistakes or we could look at the language on the one hand but we also need to look at those digital elements so what images did they put do the images support what they've written about are these creative commons source images are they sourced correctly so all of those sort of um elements now come into play if we're starting to work with digital texts we go beyond language language is still a part of it because we're language teachers right but we need to also bring in those other elements and arguably those elements are really useful for them beyond the classroom and in their future lives and in their own language as well assessment needs a bit of bit of reframing yeah well i know and i think it it's yeah david has kind of forced that i mean i know i'm sure you do as well you know from the various webinars we've run and the facebook lives it's such a sort of a big question that always comes up is how how can i test my students how do i assess my students um without you know without them cheating online well you know obviously maybe it's a question of looking at changing the way you assess and kind of using some of the tools um there's an interesting comment from kate to katie simpson um around about 152 in the chat uh so just saying instead of instead of complaining about screen time it's a good fall out from the panda pandemic in education that the educational world has embraced digital literacy as something important and that technology is part of young people's reality maybe there was a generational disconnect to neglect that so i mean i guess i don't know um it's yeah i think certainly in schools that i know of here um state school the idea of having your phone out and using it and it's not an old thing but you know the idea of not using technology in the classroom um is sort of quite traditional and still is is the case i think in a lot of in a lot of places um perhaps less so now after covered but the idea of you know i mean i would assume obviously in nicki that you're an advocate of using devices in the classroom for for learning purposes rather than the idea of you know put all your mobile phones into a basket at the start of the lesson and open your books on page such and such it's not really conducive to learning i think maybe you know that's that's sort of taking effect um or you would sort of hope that's taking effect in education although i sort of see again to sort of use my own kids as an example that now they've gone back to face-to-face teaching it's almost like they've gone back in time and you know the idea of having your mobile phone out at any point during school hours is is you know punishable by whatever you want to take their phones away from them and confiscate them for three days i i don't know i mean i know there's a question in there it's more of a comment i think um [Music] but that needs to happen now and i think there needs to be more integration of technology generally across across mainstream education to for it to advance would you agree with that yeah definitely i mean mobile's is a is a tricky one because it can provoke some very extreme reactions right parents are often not happy about their kids using mobile devices teachers are especially worried about things like distraction which is fair enough but i think i mean you know gavin and i wrote a book together called mobile learning so so we do think there is a role for mobile phones in the classroom but but two important things to keep in mind the first is classroom management i mean if you just leave your kids you know with their phones and they can sort of you know be sitting around with them in their hands the whole time that's not gonna work so classroom management in terms of device management you know when they're not being used they're face down on the table you know right here in front of you where you can see and look around the room and you can see that their phones are face down on the table um so classroom management is one area and that also needs to be discussed perhaps with the students in advance so that they understand the rules maybe you have some kind of contract or um that you agree how it's going to be used that's one area and then the second one is task design so tasks that are designed that are short and to the point and require the use of a mobile for a limited time for example you know fake news statement check it out everybody you've got five minutes everybody's looking at it okay stop phones down so making sure that the the task design requires the use of the mobile as well yeah um i think without those two things it's difficult to use them effectively yeah okay and i've got a question actually i can answer very quickly from marcela about the tool that we use for the pole um so that's just it's a zoom in it's integrated into zoom um so it's not a third-party tool we haven't sort of brought that in it's just through through zoom and you can set up holes in that way um so i'd recommend doing that with students if you if you have that uh or if you're teaching on zoom um a question from facebook actually angela on facebook how does how does time influence digital literacies for example a 40 minute session on zoom um and then tv ads i'm not quite sure what the question is and i suppose there's time influence on digital literacies maybe within the class i don't know i'm not quite sure maybe angela could just expand her question there on facebook if she's still there i'm also not quite sure i mean digital literacies is not something that you would do like i'm doing now tell your students about you would integrate into classroom activities um yes maybe she's talking about teacher training yeah angela if you could sort of expand on that and then maybe we can answer that in facebook and sort of more or less when i have time now i suppose well some really really quick question um the the your the book this literacies which is out next year um is it is it vastly different to how it was as a result it's probably about it's about well it's got a theoretical part in the beginning where the first edition was published in 2013 it's now 2021 so the first chapter which is the theory has been updated so it's got new research and stuff that's come out in the last you know decade um and then also the the second part is kind of very practical activities of the type that i've just shown you although not these precise activities although i think i have to keep calm activity in there but not the others um so those have been updated probably about i'd say 50 of those are new um to look at new tools that are being used a lot more use of social media that kind of thing um and then the third part is application to the curriculum and that looks a little bit of design learning as well which is a new trend within in the field in our field and then the final part is teacher development and how to use so there's more on you know what's available these days so overall i'd say that book is probably about 65 to 70 percent uh new yeah much more updated yeah it was kind of those things where they say would you mind updating the book and new zealand i'll do that over a couple of weekends and a year later yeah yeah quite a lot of work but yeah it's up to date okay and it's called digital literacy if someone's just asking in the chat yeah it's cool that's the title of the book routledge is the publisher yeah brilliant okay brilliant i think we've pretty much run out of time um apologies for not being able to answer all of the questions and but hopefully we've managed to get through most of them um nikki thank you so much for for that for that session for the um for giving it your time to know your also everyone we've had on is very busy i'll say thank you i know you're busy um but but it's because it's true every form you've had this week has been is busy and i know you are too so thank you really appreciate you taking time out to come and talk to us about digital experience okay thank you to you and the british council and of course to the audience for their wonderful contributions and for their questions i'm sorry we didn't have time to answer them all but thank you everybody it's all right yeah no thanks everyone for coming thanks um those of you in zoom and thanks everyone on facebook as well for your comments i've been keeping an eye on that and i've been busy as well so thank you
2021-10-09