Technology in Education, Win or Fail?

Educator preparation programs and institutional polices should provide background knowledge and experience with digital literacies and emerging technologies in coursework and strategies. The emphasis on the integration of technology instruction is relevant in the literature today. This chapter will explore the intersections and disjunctures between digital literacy practices in an educator preparation program and personal digital literacy use from a recent study that examined the digital literacies of six teacher educators. The chapter will be organized into sections, examining technology tools, digital interactions, and online resources applied classrooms.

Utilizing Specially Designed, Instructional Evidence-Based Practices and Family Engagement

Special education has the enhanced capacity to address digital literacies and storytelling, especially as parents become instrumental in the delivery of education through technology. While increasing digital opportunities for interventions and supports for students with learning exceptionalities must be a focus and consideration to improve students' outcomes, there still must be a certain level of sense-making for parents and legal guardians—particularly to strengthen student outcomes. Special educators are well positioned to help lead the work of transforming the relationships between themselves and parents. This chapter briefly explores the history of special education and race, family engagement, evidence-based practices, and opportunities to ensure that special educators help create conversations that lead to actionable opportunities to enhance and improve parent implemented interventions to incorporate families of color in the implementation of digital literacies and digitized platforms of teaching and learning.

Are There Inclusive, Accessible Reference Tools for the Post-Pandemic Era?

Attempts to integrate the twain (i.e., social justice [SJ] and civic engagement [CE]) are slowly emerging. This chapter critically explores the tools for inclusivity and engagement -- to facilitate developing digital literacies for an integrated program. Among the roles of LAM, such as, literacy, collaboration, outreach, advocacy, etc. this chapter deals with digital literacies -- the aim is to reduce the digital divide between haves and have-nots. The digital divide became most obvious during COVID-19, and therefore this dimension is the focus. The method adopted is a semi-automated strategy to support a rationale for analysis and validation of its findings. Strongly recommends the need to conduct COVID-19's impacted digital exclusion areas -- with due consideration for the work done at New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut. A combined quantitative and qualitative assessment will be required to remove the digital inequalities.. An innovative approach for data visualization is provided. It is a faceted technique developed by Dr. S R Ranganathan (viz., PMEST – personality, matter, energy, space, and time).

Opening Doors to Open Digital Practice for Educators: The Open Page Project

This paper outlines the design and purpose of an open educational resource (OER) project focused on developing digital literacies and open educational practice (OEP) within a Canadian Faculty of Education. Called The Open Page, the project features a Tool Parade of videos and podcasts created with and by Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) students). Designed to enable students to build critical and participatory digital literacies with common classroom tools, and to encourage the development of OEP, the project assesses classroom uses of specific educational technology platforms. It also engaged student creators in analysis of various platforms' implications for student data and for differentiated learning. Featured on the University of Windsor Faculty of Education's website, The Open Page and its Tool Parade of OER offer professional development resources for faculty and practicing teachers and contributes to a common conversation about digital learning between educators at all levels. This paper will overview The Open Page and its creation, and the ways in which it represents an effort to focus pre-service teachers on the participatory and production capacities of the web for digital learning.

Addressing the impact of informal language learning practices in digital wilds on the development of L2 digital literacies

An extensive number of studies acknowledge the transformed nature of literacies by building on the complexity of multimodal semiotic repertoires and available digital resources (Reinhardt & Thorne, 2019; Toffoli, 2020). The exposure to such resources and tools makes digital literacies dynamic as environments provide students with opportunities to apply their skills in praxis through trial and failure. Among the existing conceptual constructs that might help discuss the complex nature of online digital informal learning practices and their connection to L2 digital literacies, the framework of dynamic systems theory (Larsen–Freeman, 2019) is implemented. Qualitative methodology was employed to explain whether informal language learning practices are conducive to constructing L2 digital literacies among pre-service language teachers. Relevant pedagogical implications are discussed.

Technology-Based Language Learning: Investigation of Digital Technology and Digital Literacy

The use of digital technologies in developing the four language skills in English classrooms has not been sufficiently researched. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of digital technology and digital literacy in teaching and learning English. This study aims to firstly investigate the applications of digital technology and the level of digital literacy in learning and teaching English. Secondly, to measure the significant differences between EFL teachers and students in their usage of technology and digital literacies in English classrooms. Two questionnaires were distributed to 150 students and 40 teachers. The data were analyzed descriptively using SPSS 23.0. The findings show that students’ use of digital technology was the highest in learning vocabularies and lowest in reading skills, while teachers’ highest use was for general teaching practices and lowest for reading skills. Participants have high digital literacies. The findings supported the null hypotheses related to the significant difference between usage of digital technology for language pedagogy. These findings offer implications for policymakers towards designing plans to integrate digital technologies in the language classrooms of marginalized societies such as B40 in Malaysia.