What do you feel are the key digital literacy skills that 21st century learners need?

Digital literacy has become one of the major issues facing educators in this early part of the 21st century. The need to develop students and teachers digital literacies has become increasingly accepted as fact and yet most teachers' and students' understanding of what exactly constitutes a digital literacy still seems to remain quite vague. Even more vague seems to be teachers' understanding of how precisely we go about developing those literacies.

For some it is simply a matter of 'using' the hardware and by teaching a lesson that involves the use some form of new technology some teachers feel they are fulfilling their responsibility for developing their students' digital skills, but for some teachers developing digital literacies involves far more than coming to terms with the newest hardware gadget.

So to try to identify what precisely those digital literacy skills are that we should be helping to develop I've launched this crowd-sourcing questionnaire to collect and share opinions from teachers around the world.

Please read it and by all means contribute ideas and arguments for or against the various digital literacies outlined.

NB: Registration isn't necessary to contribute an idea or opinion (Click the X when asked to register if you would prefer not to.)


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Also feel free to leave questions in the comments below.

I hope you find this useful.

Related links:

• How I use social media for my professional development  
• Two Contrasting Views of Educational Technology 
• Online Teacher Development Works Best - 15 Reasons Why
• Developing your digital study skills
• Temporary Bookmarking
• Creating a personal homepage
• Social Networks and the Web 2.0 Revolution
• Create your own social network 7 steps
• A Tick List of 21st Century Digital Skills for Teachers 

Best

Nik Peachey

Setting Learning Goals

Ever done one of those exercises where you get your students to decide on their learning goals? Do you ever get round to coming back to them and really seeing if they have been achieved?

Well here's a little tool that may well help. It's called FutureMe and it's like an email message that you can send to yourself in the future.

You just fill in the form with your message and then set a date for when in the future you want it to be delivered.

• You can use this to get students to check back on their original learning goals.
• You can use it to get students sending themselves reminders about new vocabulary they have learned. They can simply send themselves a message for a week or two in the future with the new words in and see if they can still remember them and what they mean etc.
• You could also do this for test revision. So many students do their tests, look at the score and then forget what the answer was. They could send themselves the questions they got wrong or right and see if they can still answer them a week or two in the future.
• The same could be done with errors and correction. They could send their mistakes to their future self to correct in a week's time.
• They could even send themselves notes from lessons or texts or even their own compositions to review and correct.
  

FutureMe is a simple tool and quick and easy to use and could well help your students to become more autonomous learners by getting them to revise and review their work on a regular basis.

Hope you like it.

Related links:

• A Tool for Comparing Words
• Flickr and Wiktionary Based Image Dictionary
• Creating Word Lists
• List Your Favourite Words
• Learn Some Cliches
• Interactive multiple choice activities
• Video Dictionary 2.0
• Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL
• Picture phrases

Best

Nik Peachey

Autonomous Learning for EFL ESL Students

Well this news posting is actually about one of my own sites called Daily English Activities and this is a new site that I have launched to help EFL and ESL students develop their English language skills through online tasks.


I've tried to mix the tasks between activities that are 'made for' EFL ESL and ones that exploit generic websites. I've also tried to make these things that students could do every day.
So far the site is off to a good start with 9 activities up in the first week, the most popular of which is Exercise Your Ears with Authentic Film Clips.


So far the majority of the visitors seem to be teachers (80%) rather than learners (16%) but at this stage I'm happy with that as I think the site will be a useful tool for teachers wanting to set homework or for teachers wanting quick activities to print up for their students to do in a media centre or computer lab ( I've included a print as PDF function to make this easier)
To see a list of all the activities of the site so far please check out the sitemap and if you know of any EFL ESL teachers or students please send point them in my direction.

Activities so far:

• Learn a Song in English
  
• Try a TOEFL Reading Test
• Improve Your Vocabulary and Make Friends
• Exercise Your Ears With Authentic Film Clips
• Record Yourself Reading a Poem
• Using a Word Cloud to Remember Words and Texts
• Take a Quiz Adventure Journey
• Create an Online CV in English

Many thanks and best wishes

Nik Peachey