English Language Teachers’ Summer Seminar 2019

O XFORD UNIVERSITY – DEPARTMENT FOR CONTINUING EDUCATION

English Language Teachers’ Summer Seminar 2019

Week 1: 29 July - 02 August 2019

Teaching in a Digital World - Dealing with Digital Literacy

Tutor: Zilola Islamova

During this course, you will:

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  identify seven key digital literacies key in student learning
  
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  explore how to incorporate digital literacies into your teaching
  
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  build key skills for helping students operate in a digital world
  
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  develop activities and tools for developing student literacy skills
  

Faced with a classroom full of millennials and generation Z students, it is tempting to assume that our students are digitally literate. However, as teachers, we ignore the teaching and acquisition of effective digital literacy skills at our peril as not all of our students are fully aware of how to act safely and how to study effectively in the digital world.

Digital literacies encompass essential skills such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration and social engagement, all normally embedded in contemporary syllabi. With this in mind, this workshop explores the area of digital literacies and considers ways of teaching and exploiting them in your classroom. It will lead you from a starting point of definition where you identify your own level of literacy to an exploration of a digital literacy framework for education. On the way, we’ll look at how a world of fake news, algorithms and data has made critical thinking an essential skill for students to develop. Blending theory with practice, this workshop will offer you ideas, activities and tools to enliven your teaching.

To get the most from this course participants should bring with them an internet enabled device.

Session 1 Monday	Building digital citizens Often described as the fourth literacy, the term ‘digital literacy’ means different things to different people. For some it is about ICT use, for others it is about dealing with social media, but wat exactly is it? Would you call yourself digitally literate? In this first session, we’ll define what digital literacies are; identify how digitally literate you are, and look at what skills a digitally literate student needs to be a responsible digital citizen.
Session 2 Tuesday	Information overload! With on demand access to information, students (and for that matter teachers) can easily become overwhelmed with information. This overload is caused by an inability to process everything seen, heard and found on the internet. For example, if a student searched the term ‘information overload’ they’d get over 100 million hits, so how might they deal with that? This session looks at what we can do to teach our students to better search the internet, build digital curation skills and how to manage multimodality.
Session 3 Wednesday	Fake news – telling fact from fiction This session looks at how you can incorporate digital literacy skills in your lessons to help your students become more discriminate internet users by helping them distinguish between fact and fiction. It gives you the tools to teach a fake news awareness lesson to help your students identify whether a site is authentic or not.
Session 4 Thursday	Isn’t that educational use? Copyright and the classroom Often both students and teachers unwittingly use a piece of copyright media from the internet. But what are the rules? Is everything online fair game? How can we stop our students copying and pasting indiscriminately? How can we teach our students how to engage in ethical, legal and acceptable practice? This session answers these questions, while addressing remix literacy and Creative Commons.
Session 5 Friday	A digital toolkit In this final session, we pull together all the strands of the week to put together a framework for digital literacy and then explore a toolbox of apps and online tools we can use with students to help them navigate and interact safely and successfully with the digital world.

Please note: This course schedule is intended to give an overview of the topics to be covered in each session; however, it may be liable to change at the tutor’s discretion.

Shaun Wilden is a teacher trainer, materials writer and teacher of English with more than 25 years of classroom experience. Having spent two decades teaching abroad, Shaun now lives in Oxford but continues to travel to give talks and workshops about the use of technology and language teaching. He has lectured and tutored on information technology on a number of programmes for international students and teachers for the University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education. His book Into the classroom: Mobile Learning was published by OUP in 2017.

The information in this document is available in other formats on request