Teaching Digital Literacy to adult EAL learners By

Transcript:Teaching Digital Literacy to adult EAL learners By:
Teaching Digital Literacy to adult EAL learners By Manalini Kane (Lini) Tribhashi Consultant “Do not keep learners to their studies by compulsion, but by play.” A famous quote from Plato, (The great Greek philosopher from 427-347 BCE) This workshop is going to focus on the teaching of literacy skills integrating digital literacy, especially with the effective use of iPads and valuable Apps. iPads Touch technology Portability Accessibility & Light weight device Not to replace F2F Teaching but they simply drive change when used carefully and thoughtfully, offering a wide range of Apps. Adults find unlearning difficult especially when they have used desktops or laptops that do not offer touch technology. The following approach seem to work well: 1 direct instruction with modeling, 2 teacher’s thinking aloud, 3 guided and independent practice, offers us a way to differentiate instruction and ensure that all students are effectively working on literacy concepts targeted to their individual instructional level’. (Northrop L.& Killeen, E. 2013). students are effectively working on iPad Not an add-on skill but to be integrated in the T/L of EAL Presenting from my personal and professional experience. Two models to develop cognitive skills are as follows: A holistic conceptual model presented by Eshet (2012) after longitudinal study ‘A survival skill of 21st Century’ Presented the following six cognitive digital skills 1 Photo visual skills 2 Reproduction skills 3 Branching skills (hypermedia embeds hyperlinks) 4 Information skills (Imp to develop critical thinking to help them identify false, irrelevant, misleading or biased information) 5 Socio emotional skill (net etiquettes, what to share, what not to share, safety, security & privacy in Cyberspace is very important and required) 6 Real time thinking skills (gadgets in this digital era provide information in real time at high speed. Time bound responses force to think on feet, so it’s a good idea to include language related games. It promotes learning from one’s own mistakes) The results of Eshet’s research the younger participants performed better than the older ones with photo-visual and branching literacy tasks whereas, the older participants performed better in the reproduction and information literacy tasks. Hence, we need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the age group of the learners in a classroom and provide tasks that can develop and enhance our learners’ digital literacy skills. SAMR Model by Dr Ruben Puentedura (2010) Substitution (Printed books to ibooks, Pages on iPad) Augmentation (‘TeacherKit’ to