The Real Education Podcast

DDL Episode 1
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Cate: [00:00:00] Designing digital literacy.

Tamer Asfahani: Hello, and welcome to the first episode of designing digital literacy and new series with me. Tamaris for honey and Chris Woodson longly together. We've designed free lesson plans for you to use in the classroom, which are fully resourced. And this podcast series aims to explain and explore our thinking behind.

We will also discuss the importance of digital literacy in schools, as well as our take on how we would like to see this implemented across the education sector. Chris has over 25 years experiences in English teacher while I've been producing content and created the checkpoint brand. Anyway, you'll find a bit more about us in the coming episodes, but for now in this one, we explore the concept of digital literacy.

How you can meet your curriculum means through our lesson plans and how video games can be used as a stimulus to get your children's undivided attention in class.[00:01:00]

One of the things that really upsets me, Chris, as you know, and, uh, and it's something that's been inspired by, you really is this idea of digital literacy. I was never really sure about digital literacy when we first started doing this. Staff. In fact, I had no idea that the government was actually looking at digital literacy as, as a thing, obviously through my children.

All I see is this safety online stuff, but, and that's all great. I think it's really important that children learn how to be safe, online, to be aware of the dangers online. That's an education that needs to happen. But I think what we've identified is it's not just about safety. When we talk about literacy.

I mean, if we define literacy, literacy is being able to understand, communicate using a language or a form, and that's not, what's being taught within digital literacy within schools. So can you just enlighten us a little bit more about what digital literacy. Is how it's perceived within the [00:02:00] curriculum and whether or not we're fulfilling those requirements outlined by government.

What it

Chris Winson Longley: is is not easy to define because the internet is so huge. The whole digital world is so loud. So it's hard to pull it down to just one or two simple statements, but you're right. It's the ability to think digitally. Like we used to think, well, we do think language based. Um, we have textbooks. We use language when.

People are always asking in school. And this sounds a bit like I'm going off track, but in school you are always asked in an English lesson. Why do I have to learn English? I already speak English. I'm English. Why am I learning English? And I say, you might understand, you might want to speak English and your level and what you've learned and everything and your own understanding as it, but English itself is a tool.

It's a method that the world operates using. Um, so everything was written in [00:03:00] textbooks and everybody's thoughts are written down and the more you understand language and the more you can decode, what is actually being said to you or how it might be manipulating you, then the more agency you have in the world.

And if you think of that, if I take that to an extreme, when you're in a courtroom and its legal language coming from barristers, they are really working at a language level with legal language that most of us cannot access. And the, for us, quite often the truth or the justice goes out the window because the language itself has allowed for some other outcome.

So language is an incredibly powerful tool. If you understand it, You need to learn to read because the information used to be printed. Once we got the printing press and information was in books, and we did this, of course, through the industrial revolution and we had mechanics institutes and all sorts of things and people invested in education and what they meant was reading and writing so they can drive the technology of the time.

And, [00:04:00] but people use that reading then to enable them to form unions for them to read the law. The guy that he didn't trust and other areas and now inflammation and all that knowledge is being stored digitally. And it's coming through social media is coming through the internet. When you do a web search, it's going to come through the metaverse soon.

Um, and so if you didn't have to read, you couldn't access the library. If you don't know how to read the. Yes, you can access it. But one of the problems I find with it is that the access has been manipulated and controlled by people like Google. Like they are measuring your search. They're looking at what you're interested in.

Uh, you called it that failed the diminishing. Something rather wet when you're searching. It's it's putting things at the top for you on searching, but it knows you're interested in because it's tracking your searches. So natural. Any more accessing the whole of the internet and all the information.

You're only tracking what Google is [00:05:00] giving you, but we're not aware that it's doing that because they don't make it clear that doing that.

Tamer Asfahani: And I use duck. Duck go is your search engine and brave browser. Is your browser just a benefit there for anybody that's interested to, to know how to avoid being tracked.

Sorry, Chris, carry

Chris Winson Longley: on. So. What I'm saying is if you couldn't read, then you could be manipulated by the people who could read in the hierarchy and controlled by them. Once you've learned to read, basically you've got a certain level of agency within the society you're in. If you go to university and you really learn to read.

You begin to analyze language, you begin to break it down. And then when I'm, when I'm listening to a political speech, for instance, I'm listening to the repetition of this, of free, distinct, all sorts of, of tricks they're using. Oh, right. Yeah, of course. That's fine. And I've got a question in my head, but I would ask.

But of course the opposition never asked that question. They ask something else or they're interested in, but I'm able to analyze and question and [00:06:00] think, well, I don't trust what I'm being told here. And then I can go away and research and see what information I can get. Now, I used to do that through books on, we used to read newspapers.

We used to trust the newspapers. You knew they were politically biased. The independent came out saying it was independent. Um, and so he used to trust the news that we got. But again, you're only getting a fraction. Of what's out there and other things being put in context, it's just a front page splash for a day.

The internet is doing the same thing, but on such a huge level, it's all encompassing. And I think it's doing it in a way that people are totally unaware of. So digital literacy has to be not just how do you safely search, but how are searches conducted and what are the big companies? What is Google up to when it's, how is it making its money?

How is it providing the service what's in it for them? Where are they trying to take? And the internet, how are they trying to manipulate you and control you? [00:07:00] And if you don't know how the internet works. And you don't know how they're controlling you, then you, you can't respond to them. You've got no agency.

So

Tamer Asfahani: on that note, then obviously that's an important thing for awareness and being aware, but let's come back to our lesson plans because digital literacy defined in our lesson plans is very

Chris Winson Longley: different. Yeah. And we'll see something very different. I mean, I, there, I was talking really about how the government see it, how you have to be safe online.

You have to protect yourself online. You have to know that images are going to be stored forever. And I don't think people have yet complex. Right. That means they are, they are. Um, the storage centers now and they in the article

Tamer Asfahani: is about to fall down and kill us all. But Hey, that's a whole other story for another time,

Chris Winson Longley: every text and everything has been stolen. And I just think that the scale of that is not unlike, can't understand the scale of stars and space. I don't think people can understand the scale. All of the data and the information and the way it can be [00:08:00] because we're not being taught.

No, how it works.

Tamer Asfahani: We obviously are aware of this when we do our lesson plans, but we focus on something very different, which I'm going to let you kind of explain a little bit more, but I do want you to also. Talk about this kind of holistic vision of teaching, where we encompass and incorporate all the subject matters.

We don't silo them. And I think that's a really important part of comprehension and understanding and imparting of knowledge and acquisition of knowledge that if you're able to, if you're not very good at maths, but you can relate to it in another way. That you do understand through geography or through, I don't know, history or whatever, then there are ways that we do that.

So we look at digital literacy very differently. We, we believe that the safety stuff is, is, has been dealt with and is being dealt with properly. And we reinforced that that whole idea of being safe online is, is hugely important. We've done loads of stuff on big data and the main magazine. We're very protective over the content that the children provide.

We give them a platform, but it's more than that. Isn't it.

Chris Winson Longley: Yeah. It's much more it's. I mean, to [00:09:00] put it in a nutshell, interpersonal skills is what we're talking about, because we explain

Tamer Asfahani: please what interpersonal cause everybody thinks that it's interpersonal, interpersonal, interpersonal.

Chris Winson Longley: Yes. Interpersonal skills.

And yours is your personality, really your ability to work with other people in the group traits? Well, um, the interpersonal skills are the ones that everyone talks about, but don't know they call that light resilient. Determination courage, bravery, right? All those things. And one of those, which interesting the house of Lords talked about when they were talking about digital literacy and other people do talk about it, but it's this idea of failure.

I've taking a risk and failing, which we all, by

Tamer Asfahani: the way, we all were a big believers that people need to fail. You can't we

Chris Winson Longley: almost build failure into the left. The children will be, you will all fail. Great. We sort of build an [00:10:00] experimentation where a child can go down an avenue and then if it doesn't.

Fine. They learned something about themselves and they learned something about the avenue. They went down. What it doesn't do is undermine their sense of sound. And the thing is this all comes from gaming. Our digital literacy is particularly geared to gaming. We're not in the world of educating everybody about digital literacy.

Um, but gaming in particular, the gaming world is a huge part of. Digital literacy or the digital world it's now that you've got the internet, but gaming is huge. It's a massive industry. It's bigger than I think anybody comprehends how large actually

Tamer Asfahani: is and put it in perspective. It's bigger than Hollywood and the music industry combined.

And what we're seeing now is a lot of video game technology making its way into films, a lot of composers making their way away from films and into video games. Um, but what's more important is, is that video games allows an infrastructure for the advancement of technological [00:11:00] things such as CGI. Yeah, video games

Chris Winson Longley: are huge.

So we acknowledge that people are playing them and natural fat we're on the second or third generation. Now, depending how far you go back to that. We're

Tamer Asfahani: on the modern generation. We're on the fifth or sixth generation now. And then there are three or four generations before that. So it's not very well established, but it has been around a long time.

Chris Winson Longley: But in reality, my generation. To my generation. I'm not really gamers. No. Whereas my children who were in their thirties are gamers and still game and their children, my grandchildren are gamers. And so you have a situation now where if a child is in school and they're playing Minecraft or Robox or whatever, if they're playing those games that the child is playing at home, then the chances are that parent who is going to be in a 20.

Thirties is [00:12:00] also getting those games, always playing their own type. So we recognize that that, that became what we call cultural capital, that everyone is always talking about cultural capital, the capital you need to exist in the culture you're in. And gaming is something that people do rather than go home and watch television now, or easier to take over from soap, operas and things from these standards and things, people go home and they go.

So we realized that that cultural capital could be used because of the nature of games. And that's another aspect of digital literacy is to try and make people aware that games have been misrepresented. Gaming became a spotty teenager sitting in front of a computer. Absolutely obsessed, doing nothing on never going out, never eating.

We even had cases being told in America that children had died in front of a computer screen, obsessed by gaming. And this is the. It was presented to us. This was the picture of gaming that was given to us the early games. Of course, a lot of them were pandering [00:13:00] to quite negative areas. I would say no more than anything else.

When I was a kid, I grew up watching cowboy shooting.

Tamer Asfahani: To be honest with you, Chris, I don't buy that argument because I think you as the, from an editorial perspective, if you're looking at it that, or if you're production perspective or whatever, you cater to an audience and you cater to a time, we could argue the FHM and loaded magazines.

Weren't necessarily the greatest thing, but they existed and they were catered towards a certain audience. Gaming's the same. They had a very clear definition of who that audience was. And before the proliferation of kind of the we and the app stores and that kind of stuff, there was a demographic for gaming because you had to market to them and sell the product and do all of that.

So I think like anything like music, like TV, like film, like anything, these are growing pains, right. But the lessons that we. Take all of that into consideration and they use that cultural capital. They don't use abstract ideas or abstract language from, I mean, you wrote an incredible piece about Shakespeare, be damned and how [00:14:00] we've spoken about this a lot, how Shakespeare is not relevant anymore.

First of all, it was never written for children. It's second of all, it's in a different language. I mean, you could argue that it's a whole different language because it's, it's, it's old English and third of all, how relevant is it to society today? It doesn't fit. So children. Uh, disconnected and can't engage with it.

Whereas if we bring which we did with, with, with Sonic and we did Mario children immediately know that, and that's what you're talking about. Cultural capital, right? That's they understand that. And not only that. Everybody understands it. Everybody knows who Sonic globally in the same way as that everybody knows who Shakespeare is globally, but people aren't interested in Shakespeare, whereas people are interested in their current cultural icons.

So we use that, but we never asked them to play the games. And I think that's a very different thing as well, which is which, which kind of needs to be done.

Chris Winson Longley: There's nothing wrong with Shakespeare per se. He's a brilliant writer, et cetera, et cetera, as were many other writers that are not [00:15:00] focused on. Um, and so he comes with a lot of baggage and so he's not relevant to anybody.

I don't think really in the culture, but I think more of them that he's not the best means by which to deliver education. We are going to deliver reading and writing and you don't use Shakespeare as you say, because different languages, et cetera. So what we're saying is in our lesson plans that one of the best ways of delivering the interpersonal skills or the subject specific substantive and disciplinary knowledge, which is inherent in the programs of study for each subject, we think the tool for doing that is gaining.

That there is a way of doing that, but not in the way that games have been so far perceived in education and that you play the game and it's somehow teaches you. That's the same as watching a film and it suddenly takes away your need for a film degree, because you've watched a film games can only be used as the stimulus if you like.[00:16:00]

And because of the stimulus, they will draw the child. The child goes, oh, I understand this, their own cultural capital, their own knowledge gaming. It doesn't matter what platform they're on or whether they know Mario or Sonic or whatever. They understand gaming because they can already do it. They're professionals in that field, they are players.

It's like football is understand football and they watch it. So we use that, the fact that the child already understands what you're talking about. The way they work when you start reading them and understanding them and exploring them and analyzing them, they develop interpersonal skills. Incredible content because as you've pointed out to me and I was on more discovery, more and more, their locations are absolutely accurate for geography things.

When you're building a city in a simulator with sewage systems and all the rest they are based in real life data, they're not just invented. You can actually run a very real. Uh, simulation of something. And in actual fact that's what computers do. They run the [00:17:00] simulations and we do it all the time in industry and then scientific things in space and everything, but games do it as well.

A lot

Tamer Asfahani: of games use real time data. So if you're talking about, I mean, talk a little bit about kind of the grownup ones Eve online, which is a space simulator, they use real time data from NASA, in fact, so much so that they are number crunch. Um, they relate directly to the industry. So not only is it an entertainment thing, but you're helping do research for example, of exploration of space, by flying out to those places, to allow those mathematical equations, to, to adapt and they get interpreted scaled, and then sent back to places like NASA, like the European space agency, it's it is quite impressive.

The influence that games has. That, but the way in which you interact the user interfaces, the user design, all of that stuff filters through. So it's so much more than the cultural capitalists engaging with real life data, as you say, and knowing that that [00:18:00] data we've had it before the European space agency, the head of operations, the guy that flies the solar orbiter said he learned more.

His job through Kerbal space program than he did through his degree, because it's applied knowledge. Right. And you can fail, you can see, you can go back and you can change

Chris Winson Longley: stuff. So yeah, our lessons, what they do is they, they call them. The child is the professional most in the room, the child is the expert.

The child already understands the discipline. They already understand gaming, but they're doing it as a consumer of gaming. Yeah. What we won't do is make them creatives, make them more part of the process, make them understand it. There's a tie in to this and that the industry and that the house of Lords talks in their report.

They talked about the opportunities presented by the digital world. Well, I don't think schools deal with the opportunities either in gaming. I mean, if, if the industry is that big, then there are opportunities within it to work. [00:19:00] So we take children who have got this knowledge, not all of them, and I'm not, not all children have all access.

That's another one of these misnomers. Every child has got a PlayStation, not every child has access. Um, we discovered this when we had to go online during lockdown, that lots of children's suddenly didn't have internet access and all sorts. And they were discovering when, when the assumption was that every child is playing games all night, but.

It is actually something, it has the prayer pressure, the desirability of gaming. I wouldn't imagine there are many children in a school room, but when you say we can look at gaming,

Tamer Asfahani: well, we've got proof of that. Haven't we, Chris, we've got multiple examples of going in school and going, we're using a video game for the lesson today and the response has just been insane.

Chris Winson Longley: So you take all that and you're on a winner before you ever start. But then what we do is we use whatever particular strength the game has, wherever it's, whatever it's aiming at, whatever it is. Looking at that we've identified in our, looking at the game as being a [00:20:00] viable learning opportunity that the game is presented.

And we then link that to our knowledge of the programs of study, which we have an in-depth knowledge of all of them. Most primary school teachers are expected to have a knowledge of all the programs of study. So we have an overview. I spend a lot of time reading Offstead reviews of subjects, um, reading the pros of the study, keeping up to date with all this.

So then we write a lesson which is actually based on say geography, attainment targets, but how to read a map or scale or spatial awareness. And we take that. But we use a game to engage the children, but we never play the game.

Tamer Asfahani: That's known. Yeah. It's mentioned. And we have excerpts from

Chris Winson Longley: it. Yeah. Excerpts from the guy where the game is doing something.

And then we examine that. We analyze that. So what we do is we turn the game into a still image or into a soundbite, just like you would teach film. I go look at this camera angle or look at this cinematography, why is it being done? What are you being told?

Tamer Asfahani: It becomes a learning resource in its [00:21:00] own, right?

Yeah.

Chris Winson Longley: So the children are hooked because it's gaming. You stay within that because then when you're working in the subject area, you can keep relating it back to the. Well, sometimes we leave the game altogether. We, we go right into the interpersonal skills instead, and we develop a lesson which is looking at resilience or risk-taking, uh, we did one, the MPQ ML movie, secondary school, and we had an English teacher that MTQ Anelle based on gaming and the children built a board.

And it works just like a computer game, animal crossing. Yeah. You had, you took risks and you could fail and you could get sent back and you could be reborn as you are in a game. And all the things that games do when, you know, when kids are on levels, they get killed over and over and over again. I mean, this is one of the things again about digital literacy about the understanding.

Like YouTube as they like to watch someone just opening toys or whatever, they will watch other people's [00:22:00] lives quite happily. And they watch YouTube was, and I walked gameplay on games. I haven't played. So I have to watch the game play for four hours or whatever. And you realize as you're listening to them and you're watching it, they'll suddenly say something.

It took me 15 attempts to get through this, but this is how you do it. They don't show you the 15 attempts. They've edited the gameplay down. It looks like they've just done this fluid game, but getting two and four hours, it took them 15 hours because they kept failing until they worked out. What to do now that failure, isn't it, you know, you might think as a child, oh, I've got to get good and be able to do a game all the way through.

So we have to deal with that misinformation from YouTube, the actual fact, these professional gamers who are so good actually are doing what you're doing. And they're failing all the time. What they have is persistence, determination, resilience. They know that risk-taking and the failure apart to play a game frustration is part of playing the.

My son [00:23:00] experiences that now, uh, in a game he plays, he's a teenager. So he's playing more games. We don't bring into the classroom that he plays with other online players. And he gets very frustrated by them because you said, why didn't he save me? If he'd saved me, we all have gone out. Why it's so frustrating and I'd go, well, what are you gonna do about that?

He said, well, I just say people, I do it. And hopefully they'll see me do it. And they'll realize. That you should save each other because that's the whole point the team works. So he learning authentic skills about cooperation and learning and tolerance. That's what we're doing in the lessons. We are talking about games.

We are, we're not playing them, but we're talking about them and how they work and we're decoding them and we are developing. Not only national curriculum attainment targets through them specifically, but we are developing interpersonal skills at the same time. And all that is made clear. It's all explicit.

Nothing is implicit information. It's all explicit. And the teacher is [00:24:00] told now discuss what they just did and why they did it. And that's the disciplinary knowledge that Austin want children to know. When they're talking about history, they want substantive knowledge of historical dates and what happened, but they want to know how historians created.

That take on something, whether the right why the Roman empire collapsed. There are lots of views about why it collapsed, but how are those views formed ones are more logical or rational, more acceptable. And how are they funding context? Because you may discover something that you don't want to turn your culture.

About could write novels

Tamer Asfahani: for instance. Well, we know, we know, we know all of this from the Japanese feudal wars and, and what was recorded and what wasn't recorded. We've seen it in the opposite direction with, uh, posts, second world war with the Germans and how they constantly refer back to the stuff. So it's about how you want to portray it.

But I think for me, What's really good about our lesson plans and there are education. Otherwise, if you, uh, [00:25:00] homeowners as well, there are stuff there for you. It's about project based learning and, and, and we really believe that it's about empowering the children to do their own research, but also not leaving the teachers blind.

Uh, one of the things that you haven't mentioned, which I think is really important is that all of the lesson plans that we provide, not only do they hit attainment targets, not only. Multiple kinds of subject matters with different interpersonal skills, but all the resources are provided. You don't have to go off and do any research, everything that you need to teach, that lesson is provided within that lesson plan.

And that was one of the key things which I spoke to you about when we first started talking about this, why would teachers spend time looking at something? If they had to do more? They have no time anyway, so we try to provide. Everything. So it is literally a plug and play situation for teachers to do.

And the beauty with our lesson plans, first of all, they're free. So go to checkpoint kids.com. If you want to have a look at them, look under teacher or home learning. You'll find all of our lesson plans are available to download. But they also, they're not just for one lesson. If you're a teacher that can see the potential in these, you [00:26:00] can really push these out over 6, 7, 8 lessons.

If you wanted to. And we're working on something that will allow you to make it easier for you to kind of modularize. If you like those, those elements. I think, look, video games are really powerful. They're really important. They are a language in their own, right? They're an industry in their own, right.

They have other industries in co if you want to be a lawyer, if you want to be a YouTube, but the reason that. This was because I wanted to show parents that video games. Wasn't a bad thing. Screen-time, wasn't a bad thing. If it was managed properly, it allows for social connection. Especially during the lockdown.

My children absolutely kept in touch with all of their friends by playing video games, by playing Roblox and Minecraft and creating private servers and getting involved in all of that stuff. But it also allows people to see that video games when you speak to children, oh, I want to be a YouTube. I want to be a YouTube, but no, you can be a lawyer.

You could be a narrative designer. You could be an artist. You could be a UX designer. You could be a, you could do anything that you'd like within the game space, they all exists. And I think that's another really important thing as we move into and coming back to this digital literacy, digital [00:27:00] literacy is about understanding how you fit in a digital world in the future.

And I think that's what we're trying to do is prepare the children. Because they all play. And I remember one of the first things that you said to me was when I said to you ask your children, if they play games, this is when you were teaching and you refused. And then one day you decided to ask them, and you said, who went horse riding.

You had one hand go up who played football one, I'd go up. And I think you said to me that when you said, who plays video games, Every child by one, I think, but then up in your class. So this kind of ubiquitous nature is really important for teachers to understand that this can be used as a tool using games.

We can impart knowledge about digital literacy. We can impart knowledge about interpersonal skills. We can impart knowledge, relevant knowledge to children, see how they fit in the future. And I think our lesson plans do well and they're available. They've done well before. So. So have a look at them, have a read through them and they're all free.

Like I say, checkpoint kids.com and any feedback would be available. We have we're [00:28:00] at checkpoint kids. If you want to tweet us with info@checkpointkids.com as well. If you want to message us, Chris, thank you. As always for helping me navigate this space

Chris Winson Longley: on a lot more to say so. Yeah. So I really enjoy these conversations and yeah, I look forward to the next.

Tamer Asfahani: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for listening and we will see you next time. Brought to

Chris Winson Longley: you by checkpoint. Download the lesson plans@checkpointkids.com. Designing digital literacy vaccine.