Scottish Digital Literacy Week 2022

Posted by Shirley Lawson on the 7th October, 2022

Category Text-to-Speech Dyslexia

The first ever Scottish Digital Literacy Week is being held from 3^rd to 7^th October, 2022.  Education Scotland’s Digital Skills Teams have a packed schedule of fun and informative sessions throughout the week focussing on a wide range of topics.

What is Digital Literacy?

Scottish Education’s understanding of digital literacies is framed by a definition offered in How Good Is Our School 4 (HGIOS, Education Scotland, 2015, p.58). Digital Literacy is defined here as something that... 

…encompasses the capabilities required for living, learning and working in a digital society. It includes the skills, knowledge, capabilities and attributes around the use of digital technology which enable individuals to develop to their full potential in relation to learning, life and work. It encompasses the skills to use technology to engage in learning through managing information, communicating and collaborating, problem-solving and being creative, and the appropriate and responsible use of technology.”  

For our children and young people with Additional Support Needs the development of these skills needs to be modelled, specifically taught, practised and reinforced at regular intervals.  The more familiar they become with technology their confidence will grow and the cognitive load will be reduced as they are no longer relying on their working memory but have embedded basic skills in long term memory.

How can we teach key digital literacy skills effectively for pupils with ASN?

• Create a routine for the learner to independently access their device, log in and be ready to start working unprompted. At the end of the day, the learner takes responsibility for storing the device safely and charging it up ready for the next day.
• Provide visual supports for reminders and prompts where needed.
• Set up a specified times when the learner can practice skills such as locating keys on the keyboard, touch typing, mouse / trackpad skills and ideally link this to other meaningful tasks such as typing out spelling lwords in the context of a sentence.
• Support the learner to use built in assistive tools on the device.  This could be for Text-to-Speech, Speech-to-Text, word prediction, spellchecking, typing feedback or personalising setting such as fonts, computer voices, background colours, subtitles etc.
• Model to all learners how to operate safely and responsibly online and offer strategies to support learners if they are worried about some content they have accessed or if they are contacted by someone they don’t know.  Some learners use an agreed code word to the teacher (or gesture / sign) to ask for help.

‘Flewitt et al. (2014) states that technology alone does not make a difference to children’s learning, but instead there needs to be careful planning from early years teachers to deliver supportive activities that will meet intentional learning goals or outcomes.

This week would be a good week to review your use of technologies for children and young people with Additional Support Needs to ensure they have an equal chance to ‘develop to their full potential in relation to learning, life and work.’  (HGIOS4 (Education Scotland, 2015, p.58).

Here is the full list of interactive live digital literacy lessons for Scottish Digital Literacy Week.

Share what you are doing in your school on Twitter using the hashtag #SDLW22

References

Education Scotland (2015). How good is our school? 4th edition. Available at: https://education.gov.scot/improvement/Documents/Frameworks_SelfEvaluation/FRWK2_NIHeditHGIOS/FRWK2_HGIOS4.pdf 

Flewitt, R., Messer, D., & Kucirkova, N., (2014) ‘New Directions for Early Literacy in the Digital Age: the iPad.’ Journal of Early Childhood Literacy