#Teaching&Learning: Digital Literacy and the Game Changers of Modern Education

Has anyone else ever done that thing when you fall asleep in an empty train carriage and then snored yourself awake an hour later to find three other people sat staring disapprovingly at you over their iPads and Venti, triple-shot non-fat, sugar-free, cinnamon dolche lattes, with whip? No? Oh, okay then...

So after completing my usual train-related faux-pas I arrived in London for a conference at the NCVO about Cyberbullying and E-Safety. Neither of these things are particularly alien to me, having spent four years advising the as-was DCSF about the government's policy to protect young people from bullying. However the premise of the conference was 'to turn on its head the notion of embedding good practise in schools and organisations'. Not entirely sure how this could be achieved, I signed up and made the excruciatingly early journey from Durham to London's now rather lovely King's Cross Station. It was a revelation! The idea of E-Safety being effectively defunct was music to my ears, and that schools now need to be moving towards and era of digital literacy amongst both students and staff, and the relative ease with which this could be achieved was my inspiration for writing up this blog.

'You can't teach people to swim by blocking access to the
swimming pool.'

The first thing that should perhaps be explored is what exactly is Digital Literacy? And more importantly, how does it relate to our role as aspiring teachers?


There is some ambiguity as to the nature of our relationship with technology as adults. Are we digital immigrants or digital natives, like our students? Well the reality is that neither ourselves, nor our students are so easily classified. What is clear, however, is that our perspectives are different. Our students may know more about the nuances of a BBM group, but are they as savvy when it comes to the digital footprints they leave behind? Research would suggest not, and as teachers our job has to be to assist students in their citizenship of the online world, as well as the offline one. To do this we as teachers need to engage with the realities of e-safety and an online existence, and not to buy into the archaic terms of Cyberspace, the Superhighway, and the Virtual World. These terms don't mean anything to young people, as they describe these alien spaces as My Home, My Space, and My profile. The Internet is not a bolt-on aspect of their childhood. It is as embedded as pogs and pokemon cards were to us.


The advice we're likely to be given on our PGCE that we are supposed to pass onto our students will run the course of: 'Just delete them off your friends list', 'turn your phone off', 'tell your parents about it' and the classic 'don't give out your personal details online'. We might as well sit there and blow bubbles with Deely Boppers on our head. All of this advice asks students to turn away from their online activities and to be as inconspicuous as possible. Young people don't want to do that, they want to be discovered, followed and 'liked' by both friends and strangers, to reassure themselves that who they are and what they like is okay. As educators we need to accept this, and rather than show them how to be 'safe' online, we should be assisting their adoption of functional, digital literacy that allows them to navigate the online platforms they inhabit in their day-to-day lives.


There are six key ways in which I believe schools can achieve this:

• By empowering students and showing them how to manage their privacy controls
• By having better, frequent, hands-on staff training, which students themselves can participate in
• With better inter-agency learning
• By making reporting easier
• By really promoting peer learning and education
• By embedding digital literacy into social and emotional literacies.

As aspiring teachers, we cannot turn up on our first day at work and implement these changes across the school, but as individuals we can each seek to embed these approaches into how we manage the pastoral demands of our students. 

As a final note, I must pay credit to the former head of Childnet International, Stephen Carrick-Davies, who's talk on this subject was my inspiration for sharing my thoughts on this important issue. You can find more information about him here: http://www.carrick-davies.com/ 

May I also suggest that if you are interested in embedding Digital Literacy into your approach to teaching, please have a look at Adrienne Katz's fantastic book, Cyberbullying and E-Safety: What Educators and Professionals Need to Know.It's available through Amazon.

Also, if anyone else is as interested in these sorts of things as me, I would urge you to watch this fantastic talk by Brene Brown about the power of vulnerability. 

Mr James

Trip Hazard: When watching your footsteps can make all the difference.

For the last three weeks I have been working with a brilliant Y9 class, teaching them poetry analysis and how to make links between texts. The first two weeks were absolutely sublime. The atmosphere was fantastically productive. Everyone was engaged, attentive and polite, and I began to think I'd cracked this class perfectly, and that our working relationship was solid enough to give them a little more freedom within the environment of my classroom. How wrong I was...

I had planned what I thought was a blinding lesson. We had post-it notes, kinaesthetic learning, think-pair-share activities, Venn diagrams and exit passports and even a musical interlude. Despite this, and the fact that my classroom management style had gone unchanged from the previous two weeks, my class were completely intolerant of my attempts at managing their behaviour. I don't think I have ever felt so incompetent  in my entire life. At one point it took me almost five minutes to achieve quiet so as a class we could move forward. In hindsight it was clear that they were just testing my boundaries now that they were comfortable with how I work, nevertheless I was unprepared for the onslaught and ended what I had hoped would be a really exciting lesson feeling utterly deflated and to be quite honest, a little upset. 

Oddly enough, when I reviewed the responses on their exit passports, it would seem that despite my evaluation of the lesson as a disaster, the class seemed to have regarded it as a success.  26 out of 31 students responded that they enjoyed the lesson, and that they gained information from it. I am as yet unsure of how this is possible given the fact that the majority of them seemed off-task for the majority of the lesson.

In terms of what I would take from this, I can now safely say that I have bought into the mantra of not letting them see you smile for at least the first month! That doesn't mean I'm going to become a distant, cold, unpopular member of the English department, that has never and will never be my style. But my hesitance at asserting my authority and my desperation to be 'liked' by my students has completely evaporated and now I think my approach to behaviour management is much clearer and well-defined.

Mr James

Putting pen to paper...

With Ollie's legacy still in the back of my mind I decided that now (the first sunny-ish day of my post-degree life) is as good a time as any to start tackling my first assignment for my PGCE. Despite my pre-course booklet's best efforts, I can't help but feel a little intimidated by an assignment entitled ‘What contribution does English make to the education of young people?’. How do you even begin to answer a question like that? The rather large part of me that would rather be sat in the garden sipping a gin was tempted to scrawl It shows kids how to read and write and stuff and to simply leave it there. Despite this being accurate in its own way, it certainly isn't the impression I want to make in my first venture into the world of educational academia. So I sat for a while with a notepad and a hobnob and these are the answers I came up with...


Firstly, what were my own experiences of English at school? Did I observe a particular phenomenon or process that gave me an angle from which to approach this essay? Well, kind of. There's no doubt that my experience of English at school is what inspired me to become a teacher, all three of my A-level English and Media teachers were incredible at firstly making the subject bearable, then making it interesting, and finally making it inspirational. But what was it they were actually teaching me whilst all this bearably, interestingly, inspirationally stuff was going on? Yes I was learning how to read and write more effectively, but I'm now realising that it was in fact so much more than that. English as a subject trains you in the art of thought. The processes that students undertake in order to complete their GCSEs and A-levels are designed to stretch their capacity to consider facts and opinions in relation to context, and to explore perspectives and intentions of people from different times and places, but also those closer to home, and to reflect upon the impact we as people have on the world around us. That is, for me, the essence of English as a subject. It is an opportunity to become a skilled thinker, one who has an informed perspective on the world, alongside the tools with which to comment on it. 

Secondly, what had I observed from the other side of the desk? How have my voluntary experiences in schools informed my knowledge of what English as a subject is trying to do? I think the biggest contribution this question can make to my essay is that the impact of English is dramatically limited by the frameworks of examining bodies and and the pressures of 'targets' and 'residuals'. Although I'll be the first to acknowledge the importance of data when it comes to planning and implementing schemes of work, I do feel that schools are under an enormous pressure to tick boxes and to be seen to be doing the right thing. It will be so disappointing to come up with an amazing idea for a lesson or for a particular topic, only to find I haven't the time nor resources to make it happen in light of the intense schemes of work schools now have to plough through. Good schools are schools that reflect and build upon their success with innovative approaches to teaching and learning, however one of my concerns is that in order to be seen as innovative, I may find myself losing sight of the aforementioned essence of English in order to pursue the structural touchstones of modern education. This is, of course, a view I hope to change in the coming weeks and months. I would never suggest that T & L should be anything other than forward-thinking and cutting-edge, but I am as yet unconvinced that wee baby-teachers such as myself will have time to establish my own style and perspective on teaching English before the pressures of exams and controlled assessments move in to stifle my creativity. Therefore I would suggest that despite the potential for English's contribution to education to be huge, it will inevitably be measured by whether students merely meet their targets, or are inspired to push themselves further.

I then began to think about some of the controversies that sit within the study of English at both school and in everyday life. I feel that at this exact moment in time, the attitudes to towards English are somewhere near where they should be, bang in the middle of an immense pendulum swing that has dictated attitudes to language for the last few decades. We're all familiar with the Pathe newsreels from 60 years ago that feature the purest variety of standard British English, Received Pronunciation. We are also familiar with our friend from the north who, for the last ten years has narrated the channel four series of Big Brother. These diametrically opposed varieties of English highlight just how dramatically our attitudes to language have changed in the last 60 years, and I believe that we are now in a better position that ever before to observe language objectively and critically. For me, the contribution of English to the education of young people should be to create an environment in which they can form their own ideas about what is or is not the correct language to use and to see how they, as the younger generation (I feel VERY old now), choose to utilise language to create particular effects. Our role as teachers has to be to facilitate this linguistic independence, and not to prescribe what is correct or incorrect, but to shape and guide our students in the formulation of their own ideas and reward the flair and insight they will undoubtedly bring to the table.

I do of course have a long way to go before I can safely say I've cracked what contribution English makes to the education of young people. I am however now confident in approaching this most basic of questions with my eyes on both the practical and theoretical foundations of English education. I will also utilise my carefully concealed third and fourth eyes (currently sprouting from the back of my head, a vital tool when writing on the board) to reflect upon my experiences so far, and to develop my perspective as clearly as I am able, but with an open enough mind to change it as my PGCE progresses.

AND I have a gazillion books to read. Someone bring me the gin!

Mr James

The Blogging Cherry...

Welcome to my first ever blog post. Exciting so far, isn't it? I thought I'd start my blog today as this morning, I took part in an event that allowed me to realise the impact good teaching can have on young people, as well as the legacy it creates.

Today I attended the funeral of a close friend. Ollie Clark died at just nineteen years old, and he was the most amazingly intelligent and inquisitive young man I have ever met. His love of all things poetic was almost as unusual as mine, and our shared love of expensive alcohol gave us even more to talk about. At his funeral there were dozens of Ollie's peers, friends and family, all of whom were there to celebrate his life. Also at the church were some of Ollie's teachers, who had come to remember one of their most favourite students. Ollie of course didn't disappoint, his funeral was filled with poetry he had loved whilst at school, not to mention LMFAO's 'I'm sexy and I know it'. Ollie had made it clear that it was these teachers that had given him the confidence to overcome his dyslexia and to engage with a love of literature and writing that made him one of his school's finest achievements. Ollie's legacy to aspiring teachers like myself is that not only can an education give young people the keys to their future, but that it can also give young people the keys to understanding who they really are, and allows them to take their place in the world that we have created for them.

This post may not be what you were necessarily expecting. There are no nuggets of information or insights into the world of a PGCE, it should however give each of us the hope that our efforts to enlighten young people are seldom forgot, and that what we do each and every day will stay with our students for the rest of their lives.

Mr James