Elena Tarlovskaya's learning diary by Елена Тарловская

Developing Digital Skills in your Classroom - 2nd Round

Elena_Tarlovskaya — 2016-04-10 21:27:00 UTC

My learning diary.....

My students

Elena_Tarlovskaya — 2016-04-10 22:32:14 UTC

Playing with Padlet

1. What are Digital Skills and why do we need them?

Elena_Tarlovskaya — 2016-04-16 15:03:33 UTC

1.1. What are digital skills?
[padlet key='klrau7sq0kue' width='100%' height='480']

Created with Padlet

Digital skills? Who would have thought about them, shall I say, 10 years ago? Nowadays digital skills and digital competence have penetrated all spheres of our life. i can't imagine my life without online shopping, digital transactions, managing my workload digitally and digital socializing. If we look at Mashable 10 things that

young people should be leaving

school with -

1. The ability to set up a Wi-Fi
network
2. The ability to back up to the cloud
3. Basic photo editing
4. Basic video editing
5. Google docs and Microsoft Office
6. HTML and basic coding
7. How to set up a website and domain
8. Converting file formats
9. Online banking
10. How do you brand yourself in a digital community-

I should say all of them are equally important now. The only ones I am uncertain with are HTML and basic coding. As for future digital demands, they may be different from now as digital space is evolving very quickly. Perhaps digital literacy and competence will be top priority in 10 years time.

1. What are Digital Skills and why do we need them? 1.2. The future of work

Elena_Tarlovskaya — 2016-04-16 15:56:58 UTC

There's a New World Coming
And it's just around the bend
There's a new world coming
This one's coming to an end

There's a new voice calling
You can hear it if you try
And it's growing stronger
With each day that passes by

There is no doubt that work will have evolved by 2025. The development is neither negative nor positive- is is ultimately necessary. The future reality will set up new demands for work going digital. Personally I evaluate all the changes as positive. I hope work market will be more transparent and flat!

1. What are Digital Skills and why do we need them? 1.3. Jobs of the future

Elena_Tarlovskaya — 2016-04-16 16:02:58 UTC

I had an on-line interview (the first and the last) in 2013. My school does not do online interviews, staff is hired in person. I do have a LinkedIn profile. frankly speaking, I have not addressed the question of job access with my students. I should admit that in many cases they are more advanced than I am and can do amazing things on-line.
I fully agree with Lena R. that maintaining digital portfolios such as websites is very time-consuming.
My students had a couple of skype meetings with their partner-class from the USA. It was great fun and challenge at the same time.

1. What are Digital Skills and why do we need them? 1.5. Future thinking

Elena_Tarlovskaya — 2016-04-16 17:58:14 UTC

It is nice that we are trying to predict and foresee what life and teaching environment will be like in 50 years time. Ollie mentions the following drivers

3D printing of pretty much anything
Big and open data through cloud computing
Sensors on pretty much everything
Sometimes referred to as the Internet of Things
Constant connectivity via 3G, 4G, 5G etc.
More and more robots and by that I mean everywhere
Universal and instant translation
Blurring of virtual and physical worlds through things like augmented reality and holograms

We, as educators, will definitely have to adjust to the new context. These changes will, of course, be a challenge for educators as we often lag behind the technological development and innovations.
For me as a teacher with 16 years of experience it means one thing for sure: I will have to upgrade my teaching techniques to the digital demands of social environment.

Elena_Tarlovskaya — 2016-04-16 18:06:32 UTC

Lesson plan reviews

Elena_Tarlovskaya — 2016-05-21 14:50:32 UTC

Dear Ozgu,

Here comes my peer review. I work as an ESL teacher in Russia and I hope you find my review helpful to further improve your lesson plan.

The aims and outcomes of your lesson plan are clear, they correlate with each other.

1. Your lesson plan explicitly addresses the development of students’ digital skills : students have to search the Internet using various searching engines (such as Bİng ), then they write their notes on Microsoft Office-Word programme and upload them to their Google docs. account. At the final stage of the lesson, they use Animoto to create animations . Obviously, digital skills development is not the main goal of the lesson, however, a clear reference is provided to the tools and resourses used. What I suggest is that you make a clear explaination what digital skills and how you plan to develop.

2. The lesson plan incorporates good practices of digital skills development: In this lesson plan students use their digital skills in a real-world context with a real audience. You might expand the audience fo students' projects by inviting parents to review their children's work.

3. The lesson plan is well aligned with its learning outcomes: On the whole, activities and assessment clearly link with the defined learning outcomes and allow the teacher to determine by the end of the lesson if the objectives have been achieved. Besides, students create a digital product- Animoto presentations.

4. The lesson plan is balanced: I can't say that the lesson plan is well-balanced, as I can't see the pie chart for it. As far as I can see, there is a good mix of activities with five different Teaching Learning Activities used and none of the Activities taking up more than 35% of the time.

I like your idea of teaching Grammar with the help of digital resourses. Though I assume some activities might take up more time with young learners ( You can't expect them to take notes and write them using a Microsoft Office-Word programme in FIVE minutes. Organizing notes and uploading them to Google docs. account will also take up more than 5 minutes.)

Keep up doing the good work! Good luck to you!

I would be very much obliged to you if you could kindly provide a link to your lesson plan on Learning Designer.

Dear Natasha,

My name is Elena and I work as ESL teacher in Russia. I am happy to provide my review of your lesson plan.

On the whole, I like your idea of teaching students story-telling with the help of modern technology. Here are my considerations.

1. The lesson plan explicitly addresses the development of students’ digital skills (indirectly): As part of a classroom project students have to produce a group story in a digital format, using Power Point presentation and a voice recording tool. Obviously, digital skills development is not the main goal of the lesson, however, the teachers makes a clear reference to what tools should be employed and how digital story-telling may improve students’ narrative.

2. The lesson plan incorporates good practices of digital skills development: the lesson plan definitely raises students’ digital awareness by discussing in class what the students found to be most interesting about digital storytelling compared to traditional storytelling.

3. The lesson plan is well aligned with its learning outcomes: It is difficult to say if your lesson plan is well aligned with its learning outcomes as no outcomes are presented in the plan. It might be a good idea to plan your lesson in a more detailed and structural way. If there are only aims and no outcomes, it is difficult to decide if your aims are achieved or not.

4. The lesson plan is balanced: Unfortunately, the lesson plan is not very well- balanced. You have employed only 3 different Teaching Learning Activities used (TLAs in the Learning Designer) and Production takes up 66% of the time with Discussion and Inquiry lagging behind (see the pie chart for this).

Suggestions and recommendations. I recommend you to specify what digital tools you are going to use for digital story-telling production as students should have a clear vision of what steps they have to take and what digital tools they have to use to make a digital story. Besides, it might be a good idea to elicit from students what tools and applications they know. Getting to know how this or that application works may take some time.

Keep up doing the good work! Good luck to you!