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How to start a blog from scratch de Ana Figueiredo

8 Essential Digital Skills

Credits: World Economic Forum

Digital intelligence or “DQ” is the set of social, emotional and cognitive abilities that enable individuals to face the challenges and adapt to the demands of digital life. These abilities can broadly be broken down into eight interconnected areas:

Digital identity: The ability to create and manage one’s online identity and reputation. This includes an awareness of one's online persona and management of the short-term and long-term impact of one's online presence.

Digital use: The ability to use digital devices and media, including the mastery of control in order to achieve a healthy balance between life online and offline.

Digital safety: The ability to manage risks online (e.g. cyberbullying, grooming, radicalization) as well as problematic content (e.g. violence and obscenity), and to avoid and limit these risks.

Digital security: The ability to detect cyber threats (e.g. hacking, scams, malware), to understand best practices and to use suitable security tools for data protection.

Digital emotional intelligence: The ability to be empathetic and build good relationships with others online.

Digital communication: The ability to communicate and collaborate with others using digital technologies and media.

Digital literacy: The ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share and create content as well as competency in computational thinking.

Digital rights: The ability to understand and uphold personal and legal rights, including the rights to privacy, intellectual property, freedom of speech and protection from hate speech.

Above all, the acquisition of these abilities should be rooted in desirable human values such as respect, empathy and prudence. These values facilitate the wise and responsible use of technology – an attribute which will mark the future leaders of tomorrow. Indeed, cultivating digital intelligence grounded in human values is essential for our kids to become masters of technology instead of being mastered by it.

Social Networking as a Tool for ELT

Advantages of Social Networking

found pic @ ATL&S

- Educational tool:  most students nowadays are fluent in Web and social networking technologies. Teachers must leverage this knowledge to enrich the learning experience. With social media, educators can foster collaboration and discussion, create meaningful dialogue, exchange ideas, and boost student interaction, especially when they are moving inside a new linguistic code.

- Enhance student engagement: students who rarely participate in class may feel more comfortable expressing themselves on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. Social networking platforms enable teachers to establish “back channels” that foster discussion and surface ideas that students are too shy or intimidated to express themselves.

- Improve communication between students and teachers: Facebook and Twitter can enhance communication between students and teachers. Educators can answer students’ questions, post homework assignments or lesson plans, send messages and updates, schedule or announce upcoming events, and share interesting Web sites or multimedia content. Students can use Twitter to get help from instructors or other students. A great way for instructors to give participation points in addition to in class participation is by having students tweet about something that was discussed in class.

- Preparing students for active life: students entering the workforce can use social networking sites to network and find employment. With LinkedIn, students can establish a professional Web presence, post a resume, research a target company or school, and connect with other job seekers and employers. Students should follow professional organizations on Facebook and Twitter to be updated on new opportunities.

Disadvantages of Social Networking

- Social Media can be a distraction: tools like Facebook and Twitter may actually divert students' attention away from what's happening in class and may be disruptive to the learning process.

- Cyberbullying: While social networking sites provide a way for students and teachers to connect, they can be a weapon of malicious behavior. Teachers who use social networking tools as part of their activities must be aware of potential dangers and plan to intervene on minor incidents before they become more serious.

- Discouraging presencial communication: while real-time digital stream may create a safe harbour for students who are uncomfortable expressing themselves, students are missing valuable lessons in real-life social skills.

Now more than ever before the role of social media in education is under discussion. Advocates point out the benefits that social media provides for today's digital learners while critics call for regulation. Finding a middle ground has become a challenge. As an educational tool, social media enriches the learning experience by allowing students and teachers to connect and interact in new, exciting ways. Websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn provide a platform where users can dialog, exchange ideas, and find answers to questions. These sites are designed to foster collaboration and discussion. Despite these benefits, critics argue that there are serious risks to using social media in the classroom. The main issue is: do these risks outweigh the potential for opportunity?

While the discussion goes on about the pros and cons of social networking in ELT, no one can argue the influence ICT has on our students. This new-millenium generation conducts much of their life through social media. They are already using YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter as tools for learning. They expect their schools and their teachers do it, too! Let's not forget that a new reality should be faced with a whole new attitude.

Reading online

image credits: Royalty Free Stock Images

Research suggests that online reading requires a different set of skills and strategies than offline reading.  These different skills and strategies are required because online reading is frequently information seeking, guided by the reader (rather than the teacher) and non-linear (readers follow a series of hyperlinks and navigate through multiple windows rather than reading something from beginning to end).  The skills required for successful online reading are: the ability to formulate appropriate questions, locate reliable information, and evaluate, synthesize and communicate that information.

Additionally, because online reading occurs within rapidly changing technology that may or may not be familiar to teachers, and students are frequently engaged with outside of school, lessons that build on students’ prior knowledge of these technologies can and should be employed.

Finally, research tells us that proficient offline readers are not always proficient online readers and vice versa.

STRATEGIES

There are a number of ways that you can help students formulate good questions:

- For younger students, teach them to use appropriate search terms and quotations marks rather than full questions when using a search engine.

- For older students, teach them Boolean Operators (and, or, not, near, ( ), *) to better refine their searches.  Ask students to perform a search before introducing Boolean Operators and then to perform the same search after. Ask them to reflect on the different types of information these searches find.

By asking students to reflect on their already established online behavior, you can engage in metacognitive reflection about their information seeking behavior and what skills they need to develop:

- Have students draw a map of their online reading behavior.  Start with a general research question and have them draw or take screen shots of the various steps and detours they take to find the answer. Students can share their maps or screen shots in class and reflect on the decisions they made at each point in their reading.

- As a class you can use this as an opportunity to discuss how students assess the reliability of websites, interact with their peers for advice during online reading, and what problems they encountered and how they solved those problems.

In order to help students learn to analyze and evaluate the information they encounter online you can:

- Teach a mini-lessons on the differences between .com, .gov, .org, and .edu domains.

- Design a lesson that asks students to examine websites you select (be sure to provide both reliable and unreliable sources). Elements for students to check for: can the information presented be corroborated elsewhere? Is the writer of the information reliable? Is the information current? Is the information documented? Is the website advocating for something and therefore potentially challenged as a neutral source? Is there a conflict of interest present?

- Have students examine a famous website hoax (like the Yes Men spoof of a Dow Chemical site that landed them interviews with the BBC http://www.theyesmen.org/hijinks/dow) and search for clues that suggest it is a hoax.

- Teach a mini-lesson on propaganda techniques and have students identify the use of the same techniques in online advertising.  Reflect with students on how the interactive medium of online reading can increase or decrease the power of a particular propaganda technique.

Source: Read Write Think

Digital Literacy Across the Curriculum

Digital literacy is an important entitlement for all young people in an increasingly digital culture. It furnishes children and young people with the skills, knowledge and understanding that will help them to take a full and active part in social, cultural, economic, civic and intellectual life now and in the future. To be digitally literate is to have access to a broad range of practices and cultural resources that you are able to apply to digital tools. It is the ability to make and share meaning in different modes and formats; to create, collaborate and communicate effectively and to understand how and when digital technologies can best be used to support these processes.

Digital literacy involves critically engaging with technology and developing a social awareness of how a number of factors including commercial agendas and cultural understandings can shape the ways in which technology is used to convey information and meaning.

Digital literacy across the curriculum is an important handbook by the British Future Lab  is aimed at educational practitioners and school leaders in both primary and secondary schools who are interested in creative and critical uses of technology in the classroom. It is definitely woth reading and bearing in mind!

Digital Literacy Across the Curriculum
A Future Lab Handbook

Critical & Creative Thinking

You are what you think. That's right. Whatever you are doing right now, whatever you feel, whatever you want - all are determined by the quality of your thinking. If your thinking is unrealistic, your thinking will lead to many disappointments. If your thinking is overly pessimistic, it will deny you due recognition of the many things in which you should properly rejoice. For most people, most of their thinking is subconscious, that is, never explicitly put into words. The problem is that when you are not aware of your thinking you have no chance of “correcting” it. When thinking is subconscious, you are in no position to see any problems in it. And, if you don't see any problems in it, you won't be motivated to change it.

When we are thinking of a classroom context, critical thinking is thinking that assesses itself. To the extent that our students need us to tell them how well they are doing, they are not thinking critically. Didactic instruction makes students overly dependent on the teacher. In such instruction, students rarely develop any perceptible intellectual independence and typically have no intellectual standards to assess their thinking with. Instruction that fosters a disciplined, thinking mind, on the other hand, is 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

Each step in the process of thinking critically is tied to a self-reflexive step of self-assessment. As a critical thinker, I do not simply state the problem; I state it and assess it for its clarity. I do not simply gather information; I gather it and check it for its relevance and significance. I do not simply form an interpretation; I check my interpretation to see what it is based on and whether that basis is adequate. 

Because of the importance of self-assessment to critical thinking, it is important to bring it into the structural design of the class and not just leave it to episodic tactics. Virtually every day, for example, students should be giving (to their pairs) and receiving feedback on the quality of their work. They should be regularly using intellectual standards in an explicit way. 

The following wheel shows a procedure sequence that will allow you to engage your students in thinking critically:

Credits: somasimple

The following verb wheel shows a whole set of activities we can get our students to do in class, based on Bloom's Taxonomy:

Credits: critical & creative thinking

Project-based Learning: creating a viral video

The sharing and re-sharing of videos via email and through Facebook and Twitter have undoubtedly given rise to the phenomenon of ‘viral’ videos.

It goes without saying that shared video content is more popular than ever before, with more than 48 hours worth of video being uploaded to YouTube every single minute. Given that YouTube is the most popular video sharing website on the web, and only six years old, there is huge potential for virtually any video content to go viral.

What Is A Viral Video?

A viral video is quite simply a video that becomes popular through internet sharing. As a platform for sharing, social media lends itself and has certainly triggered the drastic increase that we have seen over the last few years. Two of the most viral YouTube videos last year were Kony 2012, which received more than 100 million views in six days, and Gangnam Style, which according to Unruly Media was shared 29 million times!

For businesses it has become a widely used marketing tool; viral marketing dates back to the mid-1990s when marketers wanted to create slogans or taglines that would be spread through word-of-mouth. The latest form of this ‘infectious’ marketing is viral video, which is commonly used as part of a campaign these days.

So what does it take for a video to go viral? We really don’t think there is an answer, there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason if we look at some of the videos that have gone viral in previous years. It sounds obvious, but “shareability” is the most important element; the content needs to contain something that deals with topical subjects or characters of importance to people in a cultural context – someone or something that people would want to share and discuss. If the content relates to anything that people are already talking about then it’s bound to be a big hit. Additionally, it needs to be easy to share, so made in a format and tone that users would want to share.

The Project-Based Learning Idea

As a project for your pupils, why not get them to create their very own viral video or viral marketing campaign using video editing software such as iMovie, MoviePlus, YouTube’s built-in movie editor, or Vine? You could have students build out their ideas on a notepad, share with their group, and then start mapping out what each scene might look like. After that, the filming can begin using any camera you have handy! From an iPod Touch to a DSLR, the camera quality is not the important part. While it’s great to have a fancy camera, any camera is better than no camera.

After you film your scenes, you can use the above mentioned video editing tools to start forming your viral video. For a few quick ideas on what makes a video go viral, check out the below videos as they each have a different take on what a film should do to go viral.

Source: Edudemic (sligtly abridged)