According
to Nicky Hockly ‘digital literacies refer to our ability to effectively make
use of the technologies at our disposal’. Two of their most important subskills
are search and information literacies, that is to say ‘the ability not only to
find information amongst the mass of sites and sources afforded by
technologies, but also to evaluate that information.’ We consider fundamental
for our students to know when to trust what they are reading online and when to
suspect the information is not reliable. In order to do this we can encourage
them to pay attention to the layout, whether the sources, authors, date of last
update, copyright and address are present on the web page or not. So as to help
them develop these subskills we could work with guidelines similar to the ones
offered by the British Council and Lesley University (see reference).
In our
opinion, teachers should also try to fully develop these subskills since the
websites that offer the opportunity to design material are not always reliable.
As teachers, we need to be aware of the aforementioned
factors so as to choose which websites to use and which not to. In our
experience, we have worked with Discovery Education’s page which we found trustworthy,
even though we had troubles downloading the word-search puzzle created there. This is why we will not share the PDF version with you. Another reason is that the size of the font used by the page was too small, and the label of 'Discovery Education' was too big.
During this lesson, we tell our students -at primary school- a story where the different animals play the different instruments. This word-search puzzle allows them to identify the written words and become acquainted with their spelling.
We invite you to try this tools and if you find some other webpage where to create a word-search puzzle with a better printed version please leave a comment and share it.
References:
- Hockly, Nicky. (2013) Digital literacies: What
are they and why should we care? (https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/digital-literacies-what-are-they-why-should-we-care)
- Lesley University (2007). Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria for the Classroom (https://sites.google.com/site/eiawebsite/Home/evaluating-websites-lesley-univ)
- http://puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com/WordSearchSetupForm.asp?campaign=flyout_teachers_puzzle_wordcross
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