Transcript
I’m Kellie McRobert, I teach at Nayland Primary in Nelson. I teach Year five and six students. So I’m talking to you about e-Competencies so when I decided to work on the Breakout for ULearn last year I thought I wanted to find something that was going to link e-Learning to the key competencies and I thought I could call it the e-Competencies because that was little bit clever so I did some research online to find out whether or not it existed and whether somebody was already doing it and I discovered a whole lot of research already based around the e-Competencies. It is breaking e-Learning down into five e-Learning competencies a lot like the key competencies have been broken down into five manageable chunks.
That’s e-awareness which covers:
- Digital Citizenship and understanding the online environment
- Digital Literacy which is looking at finding and understanding information
- Media Literacy and that’s understanding the manipulation and the way that digital media crosses over with mainstream media but is so much easier to manipulate and getting children to understand images that have been photoshopped
- Informational Literacy is to do with researching and crosschecking and that kind of stuff
- And technological literacy is the last one and that’s really understanding the software/hardware, you know, how to save a document.
For me, the thing was to try and find a way to hook teachers who are struggling with developing e-Learning in their classroom and breaking e-Learning in this big global sense down in to manageable chunks. And so once we did that, and we’ve based our research on Dr Cristobal Cobo Romani and he is based in Mexico but he’s done work with University of Oxford and UNESCO and so it’s fairly solid, we’ve combined that with 21st Century Learner New Zealand document and so we looked at those e-Competencies and then thought so do those e-Competencies marry up with the key competencies and how can we provide that kind of link in for, you know, everyday teachers? Teachers who want to just check instead of guess that they are doing a good job. And so we’ve developed a couple of documents that are really still developing documents and so one of them has got the e-Competencies down one side and the key competencies down the other and we’ve called it a table-mat planner and so whenever you are doing a unit and we’ve got units that we’ve done some overview planning for, the planning format is a brief note of how has your e-Learning integration covered the e-Competencies and the key competencies just to give teachers an opportunity just sort of sight it, to physically see yes not to fill the whole lot in because that would be murder by pen but to, you know, just to make sure that things are being covered and that students are getting both the key competencies which are really important but also these e-Competencies.
And I think it’s the e-Competency thing that is that I’m quite passionate about because I think that depending on your personality type you have a tendency to one or more of the e-Competencies but not necessarily the other because I’m quite a creative person, I really love the media literacy and the digital literacy and the stuff that deals with media and image manipulation and communication, and I know that I’m not quite so good at the e-Awareness and the you know good solid logical cyber citizenship and the technological literacy side of it so it’s a really good balance for me, just to make sure that I’m actually giving that coverage to students these days. From my own personal history of having teenage children who’ve been in the digital system for ten years but they still don’t cross-check their references, they don’t check whether websites are true or not, they don’t really have comprehension that the gorgeous girl on the cover of a magazine has probably got pimples just like they do, you know, it’s that sort of stuff. So I feel quite strongly that if we provide this to the teachers that these young digital natives that we’ve got coming through won’t just have that surface information the bells and whistles of e-Learning but they’ll actually get that deeper connection with the competencies of e-Learning, and then layering that over with the key competencies.
In three to five years if I walk into a classroom, I’d be hoping to see some clear, critical and creative thinking and working around e-Learning. I think at the moment the creativity is there and i think that is sort of easy and understandable if you link it to the New Zealand Curriculum with the making meaning and creating meaning tie to literacy, I think the creating meaning is happening, I’d like to see in five years time that the making meaning, that teachers are prompting students to look more deeply - but if I was there in five years time I’d be hoping that the students were naturally looking more deeply.