Digital Inclusion Infographic

Digital inclusion for an inclusive education

By Paula Barrera Londoño

The ICTs included in the teachers’ plans not only encourage and foster students’ learning when they do the suggested activities, but they also allow for the inclusion of students with different socio-educational contexts. Paula Barrera Londoño proposes to work both with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and ICTs so as to achieve significant learning through the use of inclusive digital resources for the whole education community.

What is UDL? It is a set of tools aimed at maximizing opportunities and enhancing the learning of all children and youth, making use of the tools offered by diverse environments, and encouraging students’ skills through different strategies.

UNIVERSAL DESIGN FOR LEARNING - UDL - SIGNS

Infographic of research work about UDL + ICT in teacher training

Author

Paula Barrera Londoño

BA in Special Education. MA in Education. PhD student at Cuauhtemoc University in Mexico. Teacher of the complementary training program at the Teacher Training School in Quindío. Colombian sign language interpreter. Master Teacher at the ministry program DOCENTIC.

Learning & Teaching Strategies

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Artificial Intelligence Infographic

Trying to imagine (educational practice) life after ChatGPT

By Juliana Raffaghelli

Juliana Raffaghelli, a researcher from the University of Padova, writes about ChatGPT in the classroom. “In only five days the entire humanity focused on what, how, and when this thing will burst into our daily life changing it for good”, the researcher says before going through different scenarios that can make her reflect on some specific proposals for educational practice after ChatGPT.

Autora

Juliana Raffaghelli

Researcher at University of Padua and member of Edul@b research group from Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. She has recently finished the project Ramón y Cajal, which resulted in a coordinated volume published by Springer: Data Cultures in Higher Education: Emerging Practices and the Challenge Ahead; and a volume with Octaedro: Construir Culturas de Datos Justas en la Educación Superior. She is mainly interested in thinking educational practice in its cultural context, respecting the aspects of its identity and of epistemic and social justice that make education (especially education on the use of technologies) an instrument of equitable social transformation.

ChatGPT

Artificial Intelligence Infographic

What does UNESCO say about the use of AI in Education?

UNESCO, the UN organisation specialised in Education, motivated the signing of the Beijing Consensus in 2019, an agreement “aimed at the systematic integration of AI and education”. What follows are the highlights of this consensus, whose goal is to use “AI to accelerate the delivery of open and flexible education systems that enable equitable, relevant and quality lifelong learning opportunities for all”.

Scroll here to see a summary of the Consensus.

For further information

https://bit.ly/unes_doc

ChatGPT

Infographic

Technological Innovation can positively improve the world

By Diego Caiza Guevara

The school Fiscal Mercedes González, located in Quito, has an E-STEM-based educational approach that enables transversality in the development of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics skills. Its current proposal is to develop sustainability projects enhanced by technological innovation, thanks to the contributions of computational thinking and the advances in robotics. The school principal, Diego Caiza Guevara, was nominated for the Global Teacher Prize in 2021, and is among the 50 best teachers in the world designated by Varkey Foundation. Caiza emphasizes the importance of identifying the current problems affecting the planet in order to find solutions from the education field, strengthening in turn the methodological and curricular areas at school.

STEM is an educational approach that enables the development of the required skills for science, technology, engineering and mathematics in the 21st century. Today the youth are not passive entities and they take action to solve the problems that affect them directly (studies, society, work, environment). They make use of the media they have and manage, such as ICTs, social media, and digital citizenship, so as to interact and positively improve the world.

This includes an additional discipline, Ethics, as a transversal component to achieve integral education. Remember that students not only require academic learning but also they need to strengthen the values that will allow them to become principled professionals.

It is important to work on motivation to get the students’ attention, so what is learnt in the classroom can be meaningful and valuable. It is recommended to use active methodological strategies that enable students to be the center of their own learning apart from designing a product or prototype (solution) to real problems. For example, at the school we carry out projects with ecological and social goals that contribute to the creation of green spaces, Pet bottles recycling, and to creating Water and Forest Care Campaigns.

The central core of the projects is to use technology to solve classroom or community problems. They begin with a process of planning, organization, development and socialization of the activities that aim at preserving our natural life’s treasures (water, air, earth).

The main challenge of integrating computational thinking into sustainability projects is to break with the routine of monotonous classes that are disconnected from the children’s needs. Changing this reality requires vocation, motivation and teachers being trained and updated permanently. The process of continuous improvement is supported by the validation of projects that are presented at competitions and fairs outside the institution.

Society benefits greatly since the acquired skills enable students to develop projects that contribute solutions to real problems, such as environmental pollution (reforestation, vertical gardens), ocean care (reduction of plastic waste contaminating rivers, e.g. the Machangara River), basic actions such as using a cup of water while brushing your teeth or washing your car using a bucket and not a hose. The conscious citizens of tomorrow are the children of today (“Guardians of the Planet” is the name of the project that integrates computational thinking and sustainability).

Author

Diego Caiza Guevara

Diego Caiza Guevara is the Principal at Fiscal Mercedes González school in Quito, Ecuador. He was a teacher of Software Applications at Don Bosco technical high school for 22 years. He holds two Master degrees: Information and Communication Technologies (International University SEK-Ecuador) and Educational Computer Systems (Technological University Israel). He also studied Education for sustainable development at the MASHAV Center, Jerusalem, Israel. He is a trainer of trainers at E-STEM, a Techno-Educational project consultant, and the first finalist of his country at the Global Teacher Prize 2021.

Sustainability

Technology

STEAM Edchange Infographic

Why STEAM? by Digna Couse (UAB)

At this mSchools EdChange session, Digna Couso gives a very interesting talk on the key aspects to take STEAM to the classroom: “Education and literacy should enable us to attract more people to the STEAM field, combining both positive and critical attitudes”.

What kind of STEAM do we need in education? One that is more human/humanized, inclusive, diverse, and with a gender perspective, one that aims at solving relevant issues in the community. It’s essential to foster a culture of literacy together with a culture of diversity and participation.

Digna and her team created material to teach science with science.

Download "Enseñando ciencia con ciencia"

https://www.fecyt.es/es/publicacion/ensenando-ciencia-con-ciencia

Among the various proposals, we emphasize the material dedicated to debunking education myths and the practical examples that each chapter provides for the different educational levels.

We highlight the chapter where Digna develops the modeling-based teaching and learning sequence, an innovative strategy to take to the classroom.

Learning experiences design

Digital Transformation Infographic Interview

Mariana Ferrarelli: “Data literacy is an actual eye-opener”

Pensar con datos

http://pensarcondatos.com/

Data praxis

https://datapraxis.net/

NPA Data science

https://dataschools.education/about-data-literacy/npa-data-science/

Interview

mSchools

Although we know that a “literate” person is not defined merely by their reading, writing and math knowledge, we wonder what’s the necessary knowledge someone should have to learn, work and live nowadays in a society that has been digital for decades.

Mariana Ferrarelli

This is a big question, I’d say it’s The Question with capital Q because in essence, every society defines, at the different stages of its development, a series of knowledge, values, and competences that make up the basic know-how allowing for an active participation in the economic, social and cultural life.

Currently, and especially from the pandemic onwards, the digitization of daily life has accelerated and therefore there has been a change in the nature of the knowledge and skills needed in order to function with certain efficiency in the daily exchanges.

Personally, I’m interested in talking about augmented literacies to refer to a set of sensitivities, intuitions, competences, and knowledge that we need every day to interact with others on digital platforms as well as in analog daily life. Both the technological change and the acceleration produced by information overload raise questions concerning how much of that change is inevitably dragging us and how much we can question, resist and even interpellate from each community’s local culture, from each school and classroom.

The fact that something is new doesn´t necessarily mean that it’s better than what we had, that’s why it’s worthwhile to stop and think, and contextualize the mutations promised by platforms. The sole idea of stopping to reflect is a skill that can be practiced and decided. Empowering ourselves as users choosing where and why to participate, deciding how to carry out our exchanges, what contents to read or see beyond the algorithmic regulation are collective and conscious daily exercises. In every case, they are learnings that are built gradually and that bring into play the old and the new and the possible associations established subjectively in a situated and specific context.

Teaching and learning, working or interacting in the new ultradigitized scenarios implies not only incorporating instrumental technical knowledge but also self-regulating our subjectivity to answer with emotional responsibility to the constant stimuli and the message overload. The augmented literacies are proposed as an articulation among varied skills: social, civic, expressive, play, data, narrative, and information skills. For instance, data literacy has become very important in the past few years, and this has become clear with the pandemic.

mSchools

How would you define data literacy and why is it important to incorporate this perspective in the classroom? What are your reflections about it?

Mariana Ferrarelli

In order to define data literacy I particularly like Carolina Gruffat’s definition: it implies “accessing, interpreting, critically assessing, handling and using data ethically” and it also includes a set of cross-cutting skills that aren’t merely technical such as socio emotional and cognitive skills. That is to say, the datafied society needs empowered subjects that can strengthen their learnings and dare to understand the reality in its multiple dimensions, with its complexity and difficulties; subjects that aren’t always in line with the latest trends, and in some cases, are resisting the blows of infoxication, acceleration, and fake news.

This opens up several possibilities for the classroom because we can establish a dialogue between any of the topics we need to teach and some of the portals offering databases to deepen the didactic approach with students: gender issues, tourism, transport, cultural consumption, human rights, etc. At this moment I am working with my secondary students on a proposal that explores their media practices and aims at generating visualizations to compare the cultural consumption quantity and quality in different social media: Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, Twitch, etc.

mSchools

What is this classroom project about? Tell us more. Were there any obstacles when working with this topic in the classroom? Which ones?

Mariana Ferrarelli

It’s a project we started in 2015 with the math teacher at the school when I was working as a digital facilitator. She would deal with statistics and data processing and I’d contribute with basic notions of Excel and data visualization. Students had to complete a grid where they reported their daily digital media and social media consumption. The biggest difficulty in this case was to be able to record the effective usage time of the different apps: some cell phones showed the exact social media consumption and others didn't. So we downloaded Quality Time on some devices, an application that precisely allows you to monitor phone usage in real time. There was a tremendous surprise… because many of them (of us) thought their phone usage was much lower than what was actually shown. At that moment we worked with visualizations in Excel and Google Sheets, comparing characteristics and differences of each one, etc. We also made posters and analog exercises on paper.

In our current project I am the classroom teacher and I am assisted by the Computer Science teacher, who also has a BA in Information Systems. In Sociology we worked with qualitative and quantitative research methods last year; for example, with this same group we conducted surveys on different topics (alcohol consumption, social media uses during the pandemic, time spent preparing exams, etc.). Our current challenge is to work with open databases departing from a research question we propose to explore. Last year we dealt with topics that were more related to adolescence and school issues. However, this year the idea is to explore more general topics and to use data to learn about the different dimensions of a single problem: the environment, gender violence, analog cultural consumptions (movies, theater, books), etc. The main obstacle I found was accessing databases that would allow us to work with the topics and questions raised by the students. But this was quickly solved thanks to the enriching and powerful experiences I came across while searching for resources, which helped me to imagine my own proposal and adapt it to my context and possibilities.

mSchools

What were the findings of the project? How did students react to this topic?

Mariana Ferrarelli

About my role as a teacher, it was very useful to ask for help: I realized how valuable it is to find resources and people who can help, give advice, share a reading or a proposal. Being someone who trains teachers and gives them support in their classes and projects, now I had to find someone’s support for a new adventure. And it turned out very well since I was able to get in touch with wonderful colleagues who are still providing me with the groundwork that I need to develop the project.
About the student’s process, I included a final meta cognitive activity in order to start a conversation on how they found this new approach. As a result, there was a strong sense of authenticity in the proposal, the feeling of investigating real world topics with real world tools. All of this brings them closer to their future university and work prospects: working with databases from official websites of different organizations, experiencing the need to work in groups and to agree on working guidelines, and dealing with a topic coming from their own interests.

Open data

https://idatosabiertos.org/

Data feiminism

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/data-feminism

Perfiles Educativos magazine

https://perfileseducativos.unam.mx/iisue_pe/index.php/perfiles/article/view/61019

Design justice

https://design-justice.pubpub.org/

Folder with theoretical materials

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/110kTpGh1HeP-z3bN0zgWhOGyxFIiP_fq?usp=sharing

Interviewed

Mariana Ferrarelli

Mariana Ferrarelli has a BA in Communication Sciences (UBA) and a Masters in Scientific Research Methodology (UNLa). She works as an undergraduate and graduate professor and is a techno-pedagogical consultant in different institutions where she designs and supports digital projects.

Digital literacy

Game based learning Infographic

Can we imagine classes as a video game?

By Julio César Mateus

Julio César Mateus holds a Ph.D. in Communication by the University Pompeu Fabra Barcelona and is a professor and researcher at the University of Lima. He specializes in Media Education and Digital Cultures.

In his article, which can be read complete here, he invites the reader to reflect on video games and education with the aim of regaining the ludic component while teaching contents and, at the same time, he offers strategies to include video games even when there are few is a lack of resources. Dr. Mateus establishes an interesting relation between ludic and technical advances of video games and learning theories.

One of the central aspects raised is the video games possibilities to interact which gives the student an active role in his learning process boosting his motivation, and transforming the “I must learn” into “I want to learn”.

On the other hand, he highlights the importance of error handling. It is known that errors are part of playing video games: children try hard to learn fast so they can reach new goals and continue playing, which implies they can incorporate progressively new knowledge and abilities in each stage they get past, achieving in this way significant and active learnings. This is enhanced by the collaborative work developed among peers to reach goals.

There are several positive aspects of the skills acquired by children and teens, among them, attention, memory, problem solving, and critical thinking stand out.

The challenge for teachers? To learn about their students’ digital culture so as to understand what and how they play, what bonds they build from interaction, and of course, to develop certain creativity to relate all that to the curriculum subjects. Do you dare?

CAN WE IMAGINE CLASSES AS A VIDEO GAME?

https://repositorio.ulima.edu.pe/bitstream/handle/20.500.12724/9612/Mateus_Julio_Cesar.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=yhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJdUjW_83yQ

Author

Julio César Mateus

Ph.D. in Communication by the University Pompeu Fabra Barcelona. Professor at the Faculty of Communication, University of Lima, coordinator of the Communication, Education and Culture research group, and director of the academic journal Contratexto.

Gamification

Videogames

Game-based Learning Infographic

Gamifying hybrid classes with free resources

Why are games so attractive to students?

They are captivating immersive experiences, where each one is the protagonist of their own adventure.

How can we take this type of experience to the classroom successfully?

By gamifying the activities, which you can learn to do in this infographic, with the implementation of four free and easy-to-use tools.

One of the biggest challenges for teachers working in hybrid classrooms is to keep students engaged.

This is possible by applying gamification strategies to didactic planning, no matter the discipline.

It is about implementing the use of activities and extrinsic rewards to encourage motivation in the classroom and to enhance students’ attention capacity.

If you are interested in exploring gamifying tools, you can access Toolbox, a big collection of applications that will allow you to develop different activities in the classroom.

Gamification

Hybrid learning

Media Literacy Infographic

Digital technologies, how to educate on critical and sensible usages

The wide range of opportunities and benefits cannot make us forget that one important part of the teachers´role is to work with children on how to solve the big challenges presented in this new era, all with a rights´perspective.

The education community has an important role on how to build a digital citizenship, among other approaches starting with the work on the ties children have with the information.

As we face the over abundance of information, how do we educate children to fight against misinformation? Are the children aware that they surf in systems that are moderated, defined and controlled by algorithms?

A concrete and approved possibility is to create debate spaces and discussion inside the classrooms with the students, rooting for a diversity of voices and perspectives with a transdisciplinary onset.

The future demands people to acquire reading and source analysis skills, required as sine qua non conditions to develop a purposeful flow in the digital environment, allowing thus to evaluate the quality of the surrounding information.

We invite you to listen to Liliana Arroyo, investigator from the Instituto de Innovación Social ESADE and expert in digital transformation and social impact; Sonia Livingstone, professor at the London School of Economics; and Cristina Colom, Director at Digital Future Society for MWCapital, in this EDChange 2021 video

Media Literacy Infographic

Cognitive biases, why do we swallow the misinformation bait?

How to foster critical thinking in the classroom.

In the current digital society, students can access large amounts of information. At any time and only one click away. However, not all information they are exposed to is truthful or reliable.

From this diagnosis comes the challenge and need to power critical thinking at school, so young people can analize, reflect and filter the contents they use, reducing their vulnerability to external manipulation and powering one of the most important cognitive abilities for personal and professional development.

When we talk about information and lack of information consumption and spreading, it is important to deepen the recognition and analysis in biases, understand their fundamentals so that students can learn to identify, classify and analyze content and, at the same time, become aware of their own.

Whether in consumption or diffusion of misinformation, we have a key role, voluntarily or involuntarily, as social network and internet users. As digital citizens with platforms we go from being consumers to prosumers.

When reading, searching or consuming content, cognitive biases are operating on our perception: a way of viewing the world with which we filter all the information that we face and affects all people in different aspects of life.

In this sense, when working with misinformation it is important to go deep into different types of biases that have an influence in our ties with the information we consume and spread.

Biases have a major role when it comes to understanding the complex aspects of the misinformation issues, since they make up for different obstacles to access information in a reflexive and critical way.

Misinformation production is enriched by these biases that act deeply in polarized societies that are constantly looking to confirm their beliefs and previous values.

Truthful information and news or contents that uncover misinformation campaigns have a lower reach effect than false, manipulated, twisted or outdated content, since its less attractive for not operating in line with bias

Due to all this, it is key to develop critical consumption and abilities and spread responsibility, not only when talking about misinformation but also to form a digital citizenship that is more committed with their historic time.

Below you will find some links that may come useful to work on this subject in the classroom: