Inanimate Alice - Digital Literacy

Stumbled upon this last week. Inanimate Alice is an educational website for 10 to 14 year olds. Through a series of 4 videos we follow the life of a child called Alice over a period of about 6 years. The interactive 'flash' videos are stunningly put together using beautiful graphics, powerful sound effects and music. Looks like a great resource to talk about digital literacy with pupils and plenty of opportunities for ICT to support literacy work. I could think about many exciting ways to use a presentation package like PowerPoint to support this work, along with rich opportunities for planning and creating video and digital images. Have any of you had experience of using it?

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Defining Digital Competence

In a couple of previous posts I looked at what was meant by the term digital literacy and what this could mean in the Welsh education context. These were written in response to a recommendation from the ICT Steering Group report , proposing a new statutory Digital Literacy Framework for schools. I attempted to define what digital literacy meant using definitions from groups such as The Royal Society, Becta, Futurelab , Jisc and Common Sense Media. It was very difficult to pin down exactly what it meant but there were certainly commonalities between all of them. This week however, Prof. Graham Donaldson published his report on the curriculum and assessment in Wales, "Successful Futures" , and in it referred not to digital literacy , but to digital competence (which is a term I'm far happier using). I therefore feel it's important for me to try in this post to understand what is meant by this term, look at some definitions and find out if there are any differences ...

Digital Literacy: The Context for Wales & Definitions

At a time when England have introduced digital literacy elements to their new Computing PoS, and with the recommendations from the ICT Steering Group report for a digital literacy framework alongside the new subject of Computing, I’ve been attempting to look closely into what exactly is meant by the term ‘digital literacy’, and ultimately what this could mean for primary and secondary schools in Wales. I intend to put together a series of blogs on the topic, mainly as a way to help me with my understanding around some of the current thinking in this field, but hopefully it will still be of interest to teachers and others. I'd welcome any of your thoughts or comments on this topic. The Context In June 2012, Leighton Andrews, the then Minister for Education and Skills, announced “an additional £3m of funding over the next three years to support a range of measures to improve computer science, digital literacy and ICT in schools and colleges across Wales.” This announcement came ...

Safer Internet Day 2012

If some of you weren't already aware, next Tuesday (7th February) is Safer Internet Day . The theme of this year's campaign is Connecting Generations with the slogan "Discovering the Digital World Together Safely". We are encouraging our schools to take part in this event. In fact we are suggesting to schools that they use could use this event to raise the issue of e-safety across the whole school community for the whole week. I'm going to one school next Tuesday to talk separately to both parents and to staff. We have, alongside a group of ICT coordinators, put together a series of assemblies for primary schools for the whole week, and should also have ready a brand new interactive esafety resource aimed at teachers and school staff on how to keep themselves professional online. I'll blog telling you more about these resources shortly. If you go to the UK Safer Internet Centre you will also be able to download a school pack containing an assembly, a s...

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