DATE Adult digital literacy lesson plans Sarah

For my "work" this week, I spent some time looking over the lesson plans that Casa Latina used for past computer classes, especially the ones that are related to the topics Ivette proposed and the topics brought up at the advisory meeting. Many lesson plans involved a what do you know/want to know/what have you learned format. They also stress peer to peer learning. "Problem posing" appeared through exploration questions and discussions. The Powerpoints are sort of horrendous yellow text-y things, but I kind of hate PowerPoints for this type of teaching anyway, which I think works best if it's discussion and activity-based.

I'm such a careful lesson planner that open ended "what do you want to know" lesson plans scare me a bit, especially when it's on a topic that I don't have much experience teaching with a group I don't know well. (If you've taught a lesson a bunch of times or you're comfortable with a class, it's definitely easier to have really open-ended lesson plans.) Walking into an unfamiliar situation, I'm a bit more comfortable with a "choose your own adventure" lesson plan, i.e. "I have 4 different activities we can do -- please rank them by what's most interesting/relevant to you -- we'll start out with your number 1 and get to as many of the others as time allows."

The *one* time I taught a digital literacy workshop, I worked around this by breaking the class into 2 sessions. At the first session, we spent a fair amount of time on the "what people use technology for/how do I want to use technology?/what do I want to learn?" piece. Then for the rest of the first class everyone was stuck with my lesson activities, which were mostly basic skills around being comfortable with the hardware/interface. But the SECOND session was based 100% on the topics they said they wanted/needed to learn.

BTW - the topics they chose for the second digital literacy workshop were COMPLETELY different from what I would have expected, and they used the tools in a completely different way than I would have expected. For background: A local church group had given some desktop computers to different refugee families (from Burma). They installed them in their home, and made sure they were connected to their apartment complex's wi-fi. Then the church group asked me if I would organize some type of workshop around digital literacy for the adult refugees. The adult learners wanted to learn about using something like GoogleMaps and using a weather website. When we practiced using Google Maps, students were fascinated with the street view. Their relatives and friends had been "resettled" all over the U.S. They were interested in seeing their friends/family's apartments in street view and in seeing how the weather was in their friends'/family's city. They were also interested in seeing and showing the places that they used to live and talking to the other people in the class about their overall resettlement journey. They also talked about how challenging the cold weather could be in different places in the U.S., and what a difficult adjustment this was. I never thought of using Google Maps and weather websites as a way to connect with people who are far away, or as a way to share your story and challenges with new acquaintances from your country!