Digital Teaching and Learning: Perspectives for English Language Education. Группа авторов
the second domain of ‘Digital Resources’, teachers become increasingly competent at navigating the diversity of digital resources and technologies to make informed choices that benefit their learner groups and learning objectives, and that match their personal teaching styles. Three components are included, each of which is made relevant here for foreign language education (cf. Redecker 2017: 20, 43–49):
Selecting digital resources: Teachers identify and select available digital resources and plan their use while keeping a suitable match with their learners, methods and objectives in mind. For example, learners could use the hashtag #blacklivesmatter to compile information on how the virulent topic of racial violence and discrimination in the USA is negotiated in social media such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Creating and modifying digital resources: With this sub-dimension, teachers are additionally encouraged to create their own digital resources, or modify existing openly-licensed resources (also jointly in a team), e.g. by using tools such as Padlet to create a digital collage board about the long-standing racial divide in the U.S., or to provide a resource for vocabulary enrichment (including images, text, and audio) to facilitate the conversation about this issue.
Managing, protecting and sharing digital resources: This sub-dimension includes efficient management of digital resources (e.g. on a learning platform) and dealing sensitively with privacy protection, copyright rules and personal data (e.g. when attributing open-license image rights properly in a self-made explainer video on slavery and colonialism in American history).
While the A1/A2 levels of this area entail basic operations such as making a list of promising resources for future use, creating a worksheet using Office software or sharing a resource in an e-mail attachment, the B levels add further complexity in view of evaluating the quality of a new resource, managing a learning platform such as Moodle for a class, or combining various interactive elements into a learning activity. Ultimately, the C2 level turns teachers into Pioneers that guide other colleagues or set up sophisticated and annotated learning repositories for their schools (cf. also Lütge, Merse, Su 2019).
One example of self-made educational resources are explainer videos, which teachers can use to move instructions into learners’ independent learning phases at home, or to make it easier for learners to revisit difficult content in this recorded form whenever they feel the need to do so. These videos are often used in a blended-learning environment, where students learn at least partially through online learning and interact with their peers and teachers face-to-face (cf. Ullmann 2018). Suitable tools include:
www.mysimpleshow.com: A user-friendly tool to create dynamic explainer videos in four steps: draft, write, visualize and finalize;
www.lumen5.com: This tool, normally intended for marketing purposes, can also be used by teachers to convert content into videos, e.g. by pasting a website link or new text; the tool pulls text and images into a video board, where they can be edited further;
Camtasia: This fee-based and more elaborate software allows for screen-casting and video-editing, e.g. for adding an explainer voice-over to a deck of presentation slides.
teaching and learningWhereas the second domain is more concerned with selecting and preparing digital resources, the domain of ‘teaching and learning’ moves to implementing digital technologies in teaching practice and learning processes. In a way, this area lies at the heart of the whole DigCompEdu framework, which ultimately aims at enhancing education for the benefit of all learners, which includes a shift of focus from teacher-led to more learner-centered processes (cf. Redecker 2017: 20–21; 51–59). On a fine-grained level, this competence area is spread out against four sub-dimensions:
Teaching: In this key dimension, teachers integrate digital devices and resources to create effective teaching interventions as part of a carefully orchestrated digital strategy and classroom structure. For example, the teacher could show a short film clip on an interactive whiteboard; then learners analyze a set of film stills for cinematographic devices on a tablet device so that they can annotate the stills with their results, and display their annotated stills back on the whiteboard for presentation and discussion with the whole class.
Guidance: Here, teachers enhance learner-teacher interaction to offer support to learners with digital technologies, for example, when responding to questions on a homework assignment in a Q&A section on the online class platform, or when monitoring progress on a written essay in a collaborative writing environment such as Etherpad or GoogleDocs.
Collaborative learning: Teachers support learners in collaborating, communicating and creating knowledge with each other, e.g. when they create an entry for a class wiki on a culture-related topic such as food while using chat or video conferencing to negotiate the details; or when they give each other peer feedback on essays and papers with the help of an online tool such as Peerceptiv.
Self-regulated learning: Here, teachers help learners to improve their learner autonomy and to reflect on their own learning process, e.g. when teachers enable learners to use a digital portfolio in which they plan their next learning steps, and document their results and reflections through texts, voice recordings, or videos.
In the progression scale, teachers move forward when they increasingly experiment with new formats and become experienced with a wide digital toolkit to offer interaction and guidance and to facilitate both collaborative and independent work. A Pioneer (C2) does not only manage online learning sessions and interactions, but also innovates teaching strategies by developing new pedagogic methods and adjusting them to their context following critical self-reflection. One example could be to experiment with the flipped classroom (FC), a relatively new teaching approach which has traditional face-to-face information transmission occur online and that renders it possible for learners and teachers to engage more in active and collaborative in-class tasks (cf. Ullmann 2018; Carbaugh & Doubet 2016).
assessmentWithin the area of assessment, digitally competent teachers know how to use suitable digital technologies to enhance (but not to replace) existing assessment strategies, and to create or facilitate innovative assessment approaches, by engaging the following sub-dimensions that are connected in a cascade of interventions:
Assessment strategies: Within this aspect, teachers seek to improve the diversity of suitable assessment formats with digital technologies, e.g. by using classroom response systems for grammar and vocabulary testing, or by using digital test environments for diagnosis that are often provided by publishers of print coursebooks.
Analyzing evidence: Closely linked to the sub-dimension above, teachers use digital technologies to generate, select, analyze and interpret data on learners’ progress and performance, with a view to shaping future learning and teaching interventions.
Feedback and planning: Here, teachers provide targeted feedback to learners based on the evidence generated by digital technologies. For example, a teacher can provide recorded audio-feedback on a learner product (such as a writing assignment), and point out pathways for improvement (such as the more careful use of online dictionaries, or a better double-checking of information found online).
In terms of assessment strategies, for instance, an Expert (B2) teacher is able to use a range of digital tools for formative assessment strategically both in and out of the classroom, while Leaders (C1) would be more aware of the benefits and drawbacks of digital and non-digital assessment formats and adapt their strategies accordingly through critical reflection. On the A level, teachers make use of simpler data collections, e.g. by collecting oral grades in a digital spreadsheet over a school term to show learners their individual development.
Digital quizzes, voting tools and