Week 5 (Task 2): Summarise your own significant learning from this module

Task 2: Summarise your own significant learning from this module

A reasonable amount of my own preconceived ideas and assumptions, about digital literacy in current educational environments, have been challenged as a result of this module.  The major contributing part being the day visit to a year six class.  The knowledge and skills that were evidently present in the children showed me just how influential the digital age has become compared to my own childhood.  Palfrey and Gasser (2008) say ‘Major aspects of their lives—social interactions, friendships, civic activities—are mediated by digital technologies. And they’ve never known any other way of life.’ and this seems to be the case from personal observations in school.  I now have more of an understanding as to how the wide variety of technology and applications contained within can be used to enhance and deliver children’s work.  The potential scope for technological application is seemingly limitless, bound only by the imagination of the children in your class and this is something that I feel will be a useful ethos to carry with me as a future information technology subject leader.

Up until starting this module, I had always felt that the use of technology was something that was done as an individual.  It is now apparent that the collaboration it can engender is quite striking and, with the capabilities of current technology, also gives a good degree of ability to share work amongst a team.  With features such as Dropbox and AirPlay, any work that is done can be shared within seconds.  To be able to create work from digital graphic novels to books that can audibly tell you about the contents is something that would have been virtually impossible for school children two or three decades ago.  To see and learn that the primary school children of the current age, so called ‘digital natives’, already know how to create these pieces of work and already have the experience at doing it, is inspiring.  The knowledge that they have outweighs my own and I have learnt that this is an area where I need to improve and continually develop in.

Reflecting on what I have observed and learnt, there appears to be a definite theme emerging from all of the information; one of improving my skills with current technology and continuous training and development with regards to technological advancement.  It has been said that ‘clearly the literacy of yesterday is not the literacy of today, and it will not be the literacy of tomorrow’ (Leu, 2000:744).  This is not something to be dreaded; rather something that I feel will be very useful to me in terms of my current, and future, practice in schools. 

Bibliography

Leu, D. (2000). Literacy and technology: Deictic consequences for literacy education in an information age. In M. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, P. Pearson & R. Barr, (Eds.), Handbook of reading research: Volume III (pp. 743-770). Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.

 

Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U. (2008) Born digital: Understanding the first generation of digital natives. New York: Basic books