The 4Cs of Digital Literacy

                              Web 2.0 tools and the 4 Cs of Digital Literacy 
By now I must have bored you to death about how bringing in websites into our teaching-learning-testing activities can help build digital literacy (DL) skills in our students. So, after using websites, then what? This post discusses how teaching DL can be taken to the next step. 

Do not use technology just because it's there. Nor because it motivates or creates a flutter of interest in the class. Bring a puppy or a parrot instead 😂

Or a 🐪 or 🐘 or 🐳 or...okay I'm getting sidetracked here, I got these in because I can't find emojis for puppies and parrots.   

We must not use technology for the sake of using technology in the class (as a former colleague said with her nose in the air, "using tech to s** up a class"). Use digital tools to meet DL standards/ performance descriptors / benchmarks, so that teaching DL becomes meaningful and productive.   

The International Society forTechnology in Education (ISTE) sets benchmarks for teaching digital literacy around six standards: creativity and innovation; communication and collaboration; research and information fluency; critical thinking, problem solving and decision making; digital citizenship; and technology operations and concepts. 

To make it easy for us, the National Education Association identified 4 Cs out of these as most important – communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. 

                                     The 4 Cs of Digital Literacy Image credits  

If we’re to build advanced digital literacy skills in our students, we should design tasks that require them to communicate, collaborate, think critically and create using digital tools. 
You might argue "But I've been doing these always", or "We don't need technology tools to teach these." True.

But technology tools make it easier.  Take a look at some sample classroom tasks. (This source explains how some teachers delivered the 4 Cs of DL using technology tools in their classrooms.) 

There are three very good reasons to teach the 4 Cs through digital tools in the ESL classroom: 

the 4 Cs is easier to teach when you use tech tools to deliver them 

developing the 4 Cs build language proficiency in our students, and 

it builds their workplace readiness   

Let me explain these with a couple of examples. 

Take a look at developing critical thinking. To facilitate this skill, we need to help our students analyse a problem and look at it in new ways; teach them how to connect information from several disciplines while attempting to solve the problem; explore alternate solutions available, etc. The picture below is a real-life example for solving a problem by looking at it in new ways. Read to know how people wore masks to escape being killed by the Bengal tigers in the Ganges Delta.   

                                An example for critical thinking and creativity. Source.  

In a face-to-face classroom, we teach critical thinking by bringing in a lot of information in the form of books, newspaper articles, videos, images, etc. Developing critical thinking also requires a lot of constructive discussion and reflective thinking. All of these are time-consuming and resources-consuming activities. 
Now, think about the benefits if we convert the resources to an online sharing site, hold the discussions on an online platform, and permit reflection outside classroom hours. The amount and type of information available is huge, students have access to them any time, discussion becomes productive because students can respond any time convenient and whenever they're ready, reflection becomes meaningful because there's no one breathing down their necks...    

This is what I meant when I said using technology tools makes teaching the 4 Cs easier. With the added advantage of making our students technology literate. 

Let's look at another example for developing communication skills in our students. For facilitating communication with peers - within classroom, within school, outside school, and global; with adults; with experts; with community elders; and others, where do we stand as a teacher in a face-to-face classroom as opposed to a WhatsApp group or a Facebook page? When connected through the internet, our students have access to more people, more knowledge and more skills. 

 Communicating via tech tools gives us access to a larger audience Image credits

What about the C of creativity? I'm sure you don't need me to tell you about the immense possibilities to create that digital tools gives us. (But will that stop me from talking?😁) 

Starting from Instagram or Facebook posts, tweets, to tiktok videos, the internet is a treasure trove for intelligence to have fun. 

                                                                             Image source

As opposed to the pencil, crayons, paint, pencil, paper, stencils, etc. available in a non-tech class, a tech-enabled class allows easier ways to express oneself artistically.  

The task of the ESL teacher then is simple: What we need to do is design digital tasks that encourage our students to communicate, think critically, create and collaborate. This way we exploit the information and communication potential of technology. 
How do we design such digital tasks? Enter Web 2.0 tools. 

I'll give you a simple definition of web 2.0 in this post and discuss it in detail in a later entry. Or, maybe by the time I write up a post, the world would have already reached web 7.0. The last I checked we were at web 6.0. Read a blog post here. Or a paper here.  
Or better still, take a look at the image below. Does anything in the image sound familiar?

                       A list of web 2.0 tools commonly used by teachers Image credits  

Right now, it is enough to say that web 2.0 is the second stage of web development. And all it means is that the web is not static, but dynamic; and this makes it easier for users to collaborate, create and share web content.

For example, search for Starling on the Encyclopaedia Britannica website www.britannica.com 
Now search for the same word on Wikipedia. 
Which page can you edit and change? Wikipedia. This is an example for a page that is dynamic because it accepts user-generated content. 

Here's another example. Look at your Facebook page. You write something on 'create post' or upload a picture of the dosa you had for breakfast, and the changes are there for everyone to see. 
On the other hand, open a website like my university's, www.efluniversity.ac.in 
Now type and type and type all you want, the page won’t change. That’s the difference. The EFL-U website does not take user-generated content. It is static, not dynamic. 
The EFL University website, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica website, is an example for web 1.0. Whereas, Facebook, like Wikipedia is an example for web 2.0.

In the next post, I’ll introduce you to three web 2.0 tools that are my favourites – Voicethread, Spiderscribe and Padlet.