Page 22 - ELG1707 Jul Issue 449

Reach

digital nirvana

THINKING CRITICALLY THROUGH
Wayne Trotman reads a book that blends DIGITAL MEDIA
Nik Peachey. Edited By Maria Fuller
critical thinking with online nous PEACHEYPUBLICATIONS.COM

his book describes itself as ‘a manual create an infographic of a timeline of their useful lesson plans that demonstrate the use
for teachers wanting to build their life, charting the most significant events. of digital skills and techniques. Each appears
students’ digital literacy skills and Chapter Three deals with research and as a range of tasks that are, according to
Tcritical thinking in an interactive, how students can create their own surveys the author’s notes, ‘aimed at promoting the
student-centred manner’. This sounds like in order to carry out small-scale qualitative development of digital literacies and critical
just the thing for language learners and and quantitative research projects. These thinking skills’.
teachers hoping to negotiate our current include, for example, asking their classmates And therein lies my main query
century. to respond to controversial statements. Links concerning this book and others claiming to
The author’s preface says the book ‘goes to various free tools for survey design are develop what are widely regarded as ‘critical
beyond treating students as the passive provided, such as SurveyMonkey and Google skills’. I got the impression that a lot of the
recipients of content information’ and helps Forms. content simply covered familiar topics in a
to develop the skills they need to become different manner, and was predominantly
‘productive researchers and creators of digital Just the thing for aimed at teaching English through digital
content’. media. In the right teacher’s hands (or
It also enables them to become ‘full, active language learners should that be ‘on the right teacher’s
and responsible members of the global digital tablet’?) I’m sure it will do so very well.
information and learning community’, it says. and teachers hoping As I was working from a (legally accessed)
That’s a heck of a claim, I think you’ll online copy, I’m not sure if this work is
agree. Some people, myself included, might to negotiate actually available in paper format. But
at this point ask how many of their students for those who still like that kind of tactile
may already have achieved this state of our current century feature, I suppose printing all 166 pages
nirvana. wouldn’t be such a bad idea for annotating
This volume is structured in four tasks and activities.
main chapters. Chapter Two deals with Or am I once again hinting at how I,
‘infographics’, a means of presenting dense Chapter Four deals with delivering personally, may well possess sufficient critical
statistical evidence, and how these may be presentations and how students can take skills but have yet to
exploited for class discussion. the information they have found and move into the digital age?
It examines their usefulness and the kinds present it clearly to their peers. To do this, a
of skills that teachers can help students collection of small-scale presentation tasks
develop in this area. These include enabling to help students build their skills is provided. Wayne Trotman is a
them to create visualisations of information Suggested topics include students’ favourite teacher educator at Izmir
that may be clearly understood by those films, books and poems. Katip Çelebi University,
viewing it. A typical task asks learners to Chapter Five illustrates several really Izmir, Turkey.

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