Blog 4: Harnessing New Technologies

Unlike our own generation’s childhoods, there is a vast amount of technologies which can help children to create almost anything (Futurelab, 2010). Whilst some teachers are concerned that Digital Natives are more competent than our generation of Digital immigrants (Palfrey and Gasser, 2008), it is vitally important that we learn how to foster children's digital literacy, as teachers ‘are still more equipped with higher order critical thinking skills and the subject knowledge to apply to digital technologies’ (Futurelab, 2010:p22).  Halsey (2007) is an example of where this has been successful.  The teacher created a class website which gave children an authentic audience, therefore increasing motivation and emphasizing a purpose (Halsey, 2007).  This is something I would be interested in doing in practice, as it can be an exciting on-going project which children could run parts of themselves. 

 

Whilst the functional skills of using technology are often presumed to be only taught in ICT, these could debatably be learnt and practiced amongst other subjects (Futurelab, 2010).  Learning these skills can also be child-led, as encouraging children to experiment with technology can enable them to learn from mistakes, along with considering appropriateness of the technologies for particular tasks (Futurelab, 2010). 

 

When creating multimodal texts using ‘tagxedo’, I was able to create a word cloud based on ‘The Three Little Pigs’.  This text appears to be an effective way of enabling children to consolidate some of the vocabulary they have learnt, as well as being appropriate for many subjects.   However, as Futurelab (2010) suggests, technologies are not a starting point for learning, they provide another context for learning.  Furthermore, as teachers we should strive to learn about these technologies in order to support children, as ‘fostering digital literacy is an on-going process’ (Futurelab, 2010:p21).  Technologies such as word clouds and blogs appear to provide exciting and meaningful opportunities for children therefore according to Halsey (2007), digital literacy should be embraced.

 

Futurelab (2010) Digital Literacy Across the Curriculum: Digital Literacy in Practice [online] http://www2.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/handbooks/digital_literacy.pdf (Accessed 10.02.13)

 

Halsey, S. (2007) ‘Embracing emergent technologies and envisioning new ways of using them for literacy learning in the primary classroom’ English Teaching: Practice and Critique 6 (2) pp99-107

 

Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U. (2008) Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives New York: Basic Books