We kicked off the Canadian Institute for Digital Literacies Learning today! And what an amazing day it was!
Together, we are 75 engaged educators dedicated to thinking deeply about teaching practices that will equip students with all of the skills, strategies, mindsets and dispositions they need for making meaning and communicating meaning with digital texts.
We started the morning by thinking about the question: What are digital literacies?
Everyone, individually or with a partner, recorded a video and posted it to Flipgrid. Together, this curated collection of ideas — in English and in French — is an incredibly powerful example of how a technology can be used, so easily, to explore complexity and to support all of the processes required to construct integrated understandings of an idea! Together, we captured 32 videos — 32 shared and individual perspectives on What Digital Literacies Are, and how we understand them at the start of our week of learning!
Next, during the keynote, we created a Multimodal Digital Literacies Manifesto. With partners, we identified the paths we need to take, as teachers, working in systems of schooling, to ensure that every student graduates fully digitally literate. We have put our stake in the ground — and we know where we need to go! We’ll spend the rest of the week working toward those goals — trying to build projects that will ensure the students we serve learn more ways of thinking with and through digital tools.
During the afternoon sessions, Dr. Megan Cotnam-Kappel (see her talk here), supported by Andrée Levasseur, Joshua Caissie and Camille Boudreau presented on the Maker Movement and how to integrate maker-inspired lessons in the classroom. Here is the link to their presentation.
Dr. Diane Watt, with Kayf Abdulquadir, Fartousa Siad, Geneviève Cloutier and Jamilee Baroud presented on Critical Digital Video Production and the importance of giving students experiences and a space to write their own stories in school. AMAZING.
