Teaching digital literacy. part 2

                                               Exploiting the I and the C of ICT

Why do we call it Information and communication technologies (ICT)? 
ICT provides us access to a lot of information and gives us opportunities for unlimited communication. These are what we need to tap into when we use ICT tools or digital tools in the classroom – their potential for providing information and facilitating communication.

The web has a lot of information. Think about the innumerable websites. Information overload, actually. 
The web also gives us countless ways to communicate with others. Think about email, chat, twitter, Facebook, discussion boards, YouTube, etc. 
Sadly, the only thing lacking on the web are learning tasks that make use of the potential of both. This is what we'll discuss in this post. How do we create tasks that make use of the information and communication potential of technology tools? 

To make it easier, we're going to break this up and narrow it down - we'll first look at creating tasks that make use of the information potential of websites. (Needless to say, we'll look at tasks that utilise the communication potential of technology tools in a later post.)  

                        Bring information and communication into classrooms through tech tools 

                                                                                                                     Image credits 

Think about the textbooks we use in our classrooms. They aren't written exclusively for our class, are they? Websites are like textbooks, they're written for a general audience. 
What do we do when we teach a lesson from the textbook in our classrooms? We match the textbook content with our students' levels and interests. Sometimes we simplify a lesson, bring in a picture, share an experience, introduce a related concept, mention examples, brainstorm to connect a concept with students' prior knowledge, give additional activities as homework, etc. - all to make the lesson 'right' for our class of students.     
Same is the case with using websites. Instead of using websites as they are, we should scaffold students to learn better from websites. There are many ways to do this. One such is creating navigating support documents discussed in an earlier post. 

I've said this before and would like to say it again, using websites is the best way to build foundational level digital literacy skills in our students. Don't be misled into thinking "my students can do wonderful things with the computer, so what is there for me to teach them?"

          Digital natives do not mean digital literacy savvy (a WhatsApp forward)  

Our students, to the digital born and called digital natives, still need to be taught digital literacy (DL) skills. The best way to start facilitating DL skills is through tasks that make use of websites. 
Ten years ago I stumbled on Tom March who tells us about five types of tasks that can be created using resources on the internet. In 2020, he is still relevant. 

                                                       March's task types source 

March discusses five tasks to build digital literacy skills: topic hotlist, multimedia scrapbook, treasure hunt, subject sampler and webquests. They are graded easy to difficult from left to right – topic hotlist being the easiest and webquests being the most difficult. The number of web pages to read for each task reduces from left to right while the complexity of tasks increases. (Do visit his page for samples for each task type.)

For those of you who are so engrossed here and refuse to visit Tom March, here’s an explanation: (I've linked each task type to March's examples.)

Let's start with the topic hotlist. It’s just a list of web page or website links (visit for a brief explanation of websites vs web pages) you have collected to save students’ search time. A hotlist is like a library - unless you give your students a topic to study, list the books they should refer to, or give them a writing task, what will they do in a library? Nothing. They'll browse aimlessly and waste their time. 
Same is the case with hotlists. Not much learning can happen using a collection of web pages unless you create a task using them. The navigation support document (NSD) can help you create a learning task for use along with a hotlist. 

A multimedia scrapbook is almost like a hotlist, except that it has not just reading (verbal) resources, but also multimedia resources. If you create a list of web page links that is a collection of reading, audio and video materials, your students get to see and learn a lot more about the topic. After visiting the links, you can ask your students to create a multimedia scrapbook.

Let me give you an example. For the lesson "Nelson Mandela", (English, Class 10, NCERT) you can share links to an encyclopedia entry, an interview , a museum, related newspaper clips, a video of a TED talk, a song on Mandela, websites on South Africa, an interactive map, a timeline of Mandela's life, photographs, speeches, letters, charity foundations...the resources are endless. Also, remember to share dissident voices – people who spoke against or do not approve of Mandela.     

Imagine the wealth of information the students get from such a rich collection of resources. 

After reading these links, give your students a topic (or topics) and ask them to create a scrapbook of related images using Microsoft Word. 

To make the multimedia scrapbook task cognitively challenging, the "Nelson Mandela" task can be linked with the lesson on "power sharing and types of governments" (Civics, Class 10, NCERT). Or it can be linked with the lessons on "climates", "water resources", "agriculture", "energy resources", "manufacturing industry" (Geography, Class 10, NCERT). Or history... 
Your imagination is the limit. 

I'm not saying you must do this for every lesson. Do this for just one lesson this year. 

Alternately, if you think your students have good search skills, you can ask them to locate web resources themselves and share them on the class Facebook page or WhatsApp group so that everybody can access them. Your multimedia scrapbook is ready!   

The third task discussed by Tom March is a treasure hunt. It works just like a treasure hunt. You choose around 10 web pages that you’d like your students to read. Create one question from each resource that they have to answer after reading each link.  Once they complete reading all the resources and answering individual questions, students have to answer one BIG culminating question that requires them to combine information from all the web pages they read.    

A subject sampler, the fourth task, offers fewer web links to read when compared to the other three.  However, the questions are cognitively challenging because they ask for students' personal opinion.  After reading each set of sites/ pages, the student is asked to respond to questions like 'what do you believe?' / 'what do you think?' / 'what is your opinion?' / 'comment on the writer's view', etc. 
You see why it is challenging? The questions are not factual. Students have to read, understand, think, analyse, connect the new information with what already know or with their experience, and then form an opinion. Such questions help avoid rote learning, copying of answers and plagiarism. These questions usually appear in open book exams.   
March's fifth task is the webquest. Ah! Now that is a task and a half! 
There’s nothing to beat a webquest when it comes to optimal use of websites in the classroom. Webquests are collaborative and integrated skills development tasks that develop higher order thinking skills in students. Now, that’s for another day!  
Here are two webquests I have always liked to share with teachers: 
http://questgarden.com/126/41/7/110512074451/index.htm
http://questgarden.com/52/41/5/070613164641/index.htm  

Do take a look. I’d like to do a video class on webquests. Let's see. 

Meanwhile, start slaying with the other four. 

Teaching digital literacy. part 1

                                             Navigation support documents 
There are many ways to teach digital literacy in the ESL classroom. One is using navigation support documents.   

Effective pedagogies for promoting digital literacy (now on called DL, I'm tired typing) start with using websites in the classroom. That’s it! It’s as simple as that. 
Bring websites into your teaching practices. Whether your students are young or old, experts or novices with the internet, start teaching DL by bringing in websites. Why? Because they're the most ubiquitous, accessible, available and easiest of all stuff digital,  and working with them efficiently is the most basic yet essential aspect of Digital Literacy.  

Bringing websites into your teaching is the first step to digital literacy Image credits

You’d have noticed that every time a discussion comes to using technology in the classroom, the first things the naysayers point out are electricity and the internet. 

Using websites in the classroom helps us win this argument; websites can help us beat the vagaries of electricity and the internet. Websites can be saved; several websites can be opened at a time and kept ready for later use; websites can be used for offline work; they can be downloaded or copied into a document; they're accessible for students with disabilities... the reasons are many.

The following are some things we can do as teachers to use websites to start building DL skills in our students:  

1.     1. Bring in website content to support textbook information. For example, using images or videos to illustrate or explain a teaching point.   

2.     2. Use websites to provide additional information   

3.     3. Produce worksheets with a limited number, but a variety of websites to practice what was taught  

4.     4. Allow students independent search for websites

5.     This post talks about how you can use websites in the classroom by creating Navigation Support Documents. (Other tasks that you can create using websites are discussed in later posts.) 

So here goes. 

External Documents or Navigation support documents (NSDs)

I got this idea from Craig, an ESL teacher who called them external documents. And oh boy! My students took it to another level! 

                   My first batch of students who indulged me and my experiments  

For the ESL teacher and learner, the internet is an abundance of resources. There are millions of websites already created for learning and teaching English. But these remain useless if students do not know where to locate them, when to use them or how to use them. Many students spend long hours searching for websites and once they find them, realise they have no idea how to use them. 

The job of the teacher here is simple: teachers need to be able to identify websites for students to access in order to achieve a learning objective. Once the teacher identifies websites that align with the learning objective and match the levels of students, he/she should be able to explain to students how to use those sites. This is what a navigation support document (NSD) does. 
If you would like to see an example before reading the description, please click here.  

So, how do we design a NSD? 

First step: Keep the objective specific and focused. (For example, I want to teach the use of reported speech. That's my learning objective.)

Second step: Identify websites or web pages** that help learners learn, practice and test this specific item. (To start with, choose around 3 sites for each activity of learning, practicing and testing reported speech.) 

** Note: Let me explain the difference between a website and a web page. Let's use the example of teaching reported speech. One website we can ask our learners to visit is 
https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/  This is a website. 

But how do the students locate 'reported speech' on this site? How do they know which lesson is right for them? 
So instead, you give them the exact location where reported speech appears on the website.  
https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/intermediate-to-upper-intermediate/reported-speech-1-statements This takes you to a web page. 
The web page is located inside a website. Web page links are easier for young or novice learners since it takes them directly to the lesson they're supposed to do. 
You can share links to websites if you want your students to acquire additional skills of searching and retrieving information from websites. End of note**  

Third step: Once you identify websites or web pages, copy and paste these links on a Microsoft Word document. (Remember, the links need to be clickable.)

Fourth step: Write clear instructions to guide students to move through these links – what should they do first, second, third, etc.  

Fifth step: Share the document with your students via email or WhatsApp or class FB page.  

The NSD is a Word document that lists links and also gives instructions on how to use these links. Here is an example for an NSD for teaching simple past tense.  

Here's another NSD for reading and use of linking words. 

Note: All the NSDs I shared above are open educational resources (OERs) uploaded on www.oercommons.org You're free to use them as and how you want. Though I've modified and updated all of them, many of them were originally created by my student teachers who I've acknowledged on the resource.  

                                          We'll talk about OERs in another post.  

Take a close look at the NSDs I shared above. You'd notice that they use multiple web pages as

1.        Warm up activity
2.         Presentation
3.        Practice
4.         Application/ Evaluation/ Wrap-up

I usually ask student teachers to choose web pages following roughly the present-practice-produce (or test) model. 

For teaching the skills of reading, speaking or writing you can follow the pre- while- post model. Take a look at an NSD to teach reading. This follows the pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading model. 

Here’s a summing up: 

• A navigation support document (NSD) can be created using MS Word. It is an electronic document that is a collection of web page/website links. 
• NSD helps you to collect and send to your students web resources that can help them acquire a specific learning objective.
• NSD makes web content relevant for students by delivering clear instructions on how to use each link.
• NSD helps learners navigate through multiple sites in order to achieve a learning goal/ objective.
• Using a navigation support document (NSD) can promote digital literacy in our students. 

Read on if you'd like to know how we can also go beyond an NSD. You can enhance the value of NSDs by adding your own activities to it. 

So, at the end of an NSD, you can add  

• a "Handout" you put together of points to remember, 
• a "Worksheet" created by you for students to practice, or 
• a "Test" designed by you that you want them to complete and return. 

This way, the NSD becomes a complete learning package. Or a learning object.**

** Note: A learning object is a collection of digital content that includes teaching items, practice items and assessment items, combined to deliver a single learning objective.

1. A learning object is an entire module that has a clear objective and can be used for self-learning. 
2. It is self-contained since it is a complete package that includes instruction, practice and assessment. 
3. A learning object is made of authentic materials. 
4. It is reusable. Many learning objects can be put together or aggregated to form a complete course. 
5. It can be cross linked with other modules, courses or even subjects. 

Learning objects are of relevance to the online teacher because they are made best possible through technology. End of note**  

An example for a learning object would be an audio or video of live/ recorded lecture + a navigation support document + a task using a web 2.0 tool.

Take a look at the following reported speech activities on oercommons. 

https://www.oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/65816 - NSD
https://www.oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/65819 - Handout
https://www.oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/65822 - worksheet  

Together they create a fantastic learning object to learn reported speech.   
    

Go on, slay it! 

Cheers.