Digital Literacy - Gavin Dudeney

People are talking about DSL (Digital as a Second Language) nowadays and Gavin's talk was about the importance of being digitally fluent if you're a 21st century teacher. So important in fact, that Gavin has written a book about it, with co-authors Nicky Hockley and Mark Pegrum (Digital Literacies, Pearson, 2013)

There are many different digital literacies relevant to language: (texting, print, gaming, mobile, multimedia, code); others with a focus on information (information, search, tagging); those that relate to connections (personal, participatory, network, and (inter)cultural) and remix.

The last of these Gavin illustrated by showing a video of Tony Blair and George Bush's love song.


In the current age, we need to take all of these into consideration because they are part of the skill set that people need and in some ways, as Gavin mentioned, educators are now preparing people for jobs that currently don't exist.

Mobility is now one of the key factors and the shift to handheld devices has now started to have an impact upon what many teachers now do in class. Despite this, many of our students perceive that there is a gap between what happens in the real world and what happens in the classroom.

This means that a lot of us need to 'up-skill' Gavin shared the TPK model (technological, pedagogical knowledge) that he believes is the way that we should be moving. Another model of technology application in class is the SAMR model (substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition)

Gavin finished by taking questions from the audience and sharing his slides (http://www.dudeney.com/DigiLitLiverpool.pdf) and resources (http://www.theconsultants-e.com/resources/ToolsResources/DigiLit.aspx

Unplugged and connected: where ideas meet

Burcu Akyol and Luke Meddings were the final speakers of the LT SIG day.

In December they led an 'Unplugged and Connected' course in Istanbul that explored how dogme and technology can enhance and reinforce each other in the classroom. They shared reflections and outputs from the course in this session - and shared some practical classroom ideas.

Luke started by giving an overview about teaching unplugged and this was followed by Burcu talking about how Dogme ELT affected her approach to teaching when she first came across it. Burcu is an enthusiastic user of learning technology too and she has reflected on how technology and teaching unplugged can be combined to benefit both learners and teachers.

Burcu talked about the importance of PLNs (Personal Learning Networks) and how teachers who connect with other teachers in this way an benefit. Luke asked whether being connected was necessary and stated that the two approaches, teaching unplugged and connected teaching can be used separately, but when they taught their course in Istanbul, they asked participants to think of where the connections between the both may lie.

Luke talked about how the debate about the use of technology has now moved on and he talked about the early efforts of educators about blending Dogme and technology (Dogme 2.0) and how things have changed since then. Indeed, so much has changed it is often difficult to understand what a different world it is that we currently live in to what it was. Luke took blogging as a particular example to how powerful connecting locally situated learning and also looking beyond borders. He suggested that this type of connection is very compatible with Dogme.

One particular problem is that there are so many different tools to choose from, and Burcu shared a checklist with the audience to help us decide which technology to use. The questions on this digital handout (check for it on the IATEFL Liverpool online website) is something that every teacher should keep in mind. Burcu then began to show a number of practical ideas and tools that teachers can use, such as Evernote (https://evernote.com/), LinoIt (http://en.linoit.com/) and ScoopIt (http://www.scoop.it/).

Burcu talked about using Evernote as a repository for digital portfolios and online student notebooks. This powerful tool has lots of different features that some teachers and learners may not be aware of and she recommends people explore the tool more deeply than they at first may have done.Burcu also mentioned a number of other tools that are compatible with Dogme such as Edmodo.

Luke finished by talking about the interesting connections that were made by participants on the Istanbul course and other ideas that came out of it that we're both related to constructivist knowledge co-creation and technology in the classroom.

Paul Driver - Cities, communities, memory and culture

Paul Driver, who has been nominated for an ELTon for his game Spywalk, started his presentation by sharing his love of drawing architecture whenever he visits a new city. Whenever he does this, locals often come over and talk to him, telling him their life stories and talking about the place.

There is an inter-twining relationship between people and the cities they live in. Showing a map of New York, Paul talked about trying to understand. City by looking at an aerial view.

Maps, Paul stated are things we often think of as objective, but maps are never objective, they are always subjective and show things that the map-maker decides to show. Maps have often been used for propaganda devices.

Talking about memory and identity, Paul reminds us that memory is often augmented in many different ways - through written notes and latterly, our phones, and even things like smells and tattoos. Our memories are also shared with family and friends, often distributed among a number of different people. Memory I Ali embodied and embedded. If you look at movies, for example Memento, you can see examples of this embodied memory, with the main character, Leonard, who suffers from memory loss, uses photos, notes and tattoos as aids o his memory.

Nowadays there is often a fear that we rely too much on our phones and other devices to remember things. For instance, know many people in the audience now know their own telephone numbers. Many in the audience recognized that they didn't. We are now often experiencing the world nowadays as it is presented to us through our screens.

Augmented reality is an example of

The new aesthetic movement has emerged to categorize and critique this change in society. An example of this is the "cell trance" and the "obsessive checking" of mobiles for messages. Adam Bartholl's change project (http://datenform.de/) is another example of how the digital interfaces with the real.

The yellow arrow project is a new form of city markup that sees people post yellow arrows on things they think are culturally relevant. Another interesting project is guerrilla gardening - a hands-on approach to improving the spaces where we live. Guerilla gardeners reclaim land (http://guerillagardeners.org) and plant food or flowers to improve quality of life.

Paul drew all of these ideas together sharing his Urban Chronicles Project using an app called Moveable Feast ( http://mvabl.com) and finished by showing an example of one of the student's work

Literature strikes back

The IATEFL ltsig Diana Eastment / Travel grant scholarship winners this year are Dimitris Primalis and Chryssanthe Sotiriou, who work in schools that have class sets of tablets. 

They are both interested in how best to get students reading literature using new technology

The speakers first showed 2 examples of literature and asked the audience to think about the following: Layout, lexis, length of text, visual aids, learning styles, skills.

Next, half of the audience  were first asked to listen to an excerpt of the film (http://i.imgur.com/ywKjqEw.jpg) Rebecca while the others blocked their ears. After this those who blocked their ears were asked to watch the same excerpt of the film without sound. The audience then shared notes and talked together.

The idea of doing an activity like this is to stimulate learner interest. The speakers believe that this is the only way to get a ten year old boy to read a novel such as Rebecca. They use http://www.edmodo.com/ to stimulate the discussion and then in class afterwards they were motivated to read the book.

Chryssanthe has used the site http://www.60secondrecap.com/ to help motivate the students. Here there are short videos about books and she has found it is very popular.the speakers have also used Skype in the classroom, inviting authors and other experts into the classroom this way.

Dimitris also uses things like sounds to stimulate interest, first playing some sounds related to a paragraph from a book he wanted the students to read and following up with the actual book chapter (the Day of the Triffids, in this example).

The students also use interactive course books with their laptops. In class, they look at some of the p ages, then the students are encouraged to read at home. There is also videos that go with this too. After reading and watching, the students are asked to respond on a site such as http://en.linoit.com/ or to put their favorite words into a site such as http://www.tagxedo.com/

Chryssanthe finishes by emphasizing that you can integrate technology into your classroom by getting involved and getting Trainner and becoming engaged with it in order to share that literature is something that they shouldn't be scared of, that they can learn to enjoy and learn from.

Flipping the classroom - Lindsay Warwick

Lindsay Warwick also uses ideas behind the flipped classroom method in her own classes, but uses it in a different way to Stephen. Her focus is more on the homework aspect.

She sees that some of. The benefits include students taking control of the learning process, it is very personalized and it helps the students to learn how to learn as well as enabling her to engage more in 1:1 learning. She has found that students are also more engaged with this system and in a 2012 study (Classroom Window) it was reported that 80% of students were more engaged by using the flipped classroom method.

Lindsay started to use this method, but at first it failed. It failed because students had a lack of study skills and were also unmotivated.

Lindsay was then forced to adopt a different approach that involved the students creating weekly objectives, checking each other's notes and setting individual deadlines. The 'naughty' students (i.e. those who hadn't watched the video) would be asked to watch the videos in class times, while the other students are involved in more interesting classroom tasks. This method means that the students quickly learn that it is better f or them to do the homework so they can use the class time more productively.

Lindsay has found that she has time with this method to spend time to help those students without sufficient study skills and help them become better at learning to learn.

The weekly objectives generally were set using 'can do' statements and gets them quickly working in pairs or small groups to discuss why these are important for them to learn how to do. She also gives them a checklist and the students tick the ones they think they need to know. This is used as the basis of the weekly timetable and it means the students feel the lessons are more relevant to what they would otherwise be. The weekly objectives then are explicit and they are shown how they can achieve them. Finally, the students are encouraged to talk about how they think they did.

To get the students to watch the video, she usually gives them a teaser. For example, she shows the students an email and asks the students to say what's wrong with it. After hearing their answers, she neither agrees or disagrees, but asks the students to watch the video to find out.

Another option is using a screenshot from the video, for example, Lily's surprise (http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=RY9kJEurNZo&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DRY9kJEurNZo   ), encourages the students to watch the video and makes the videos more engaging.

Lindsay uses the method with a pre-intermediate class at the moment and has started a line of progression starting it off in class and then moving towards the students doing more at home. This seems t o be working so far, and the students are becoming better learners too. Her next step is to add an element of peer teaching into the process.