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Quizizz, Poll Everywhere, The Answer Pad, Kahoot!

      Digital portfolios: Seesaw, Bulb, Padlet, or personalized sections within the virtual learning environment or management system a class is using.

      empowering learnersThe area of empowering learners addresses the potential of digital technologies to enhance learner-centered pedagogies that involve learners equally and deeply in the learning process. In particular, this area encourages teachers to work on central educational challenges such as inclusion and more personalized and differentiated teaching. In a way, it can be said that this area develops a specification of the broader areas of digital resources and of teaching and learning (Redecker 2017: 22; 70–75). Sub-dimensions of learner empowerment include:

       Accessibility and inclusion: With this competence, teachers ensure that all learners have access to the digital resources in use, in particular learners with special needs and different abilities. This includes, first of all, to consider digital resources that can be accessed by all depending on available technological equipment, and to create or modify learning resources with special needs in mind. This also covers the use of assistive technologies, e.g. by using recorded audio rather than textual task instructions, or by changing design principles concerning font, size and color in worksheets for learners with visual impairments.

       Differentiation and personalization: Here, teachers implement differentiation strategies according to learner levels and needs and design individual learning pathways through digital technologies (e.g. by practicing dialogues at different difficulty levels with the tool Voki where learners speak through avatars, by using online quizzes with different speeds, by developing individual work plans in digital portfolios, or by making available additional tasks in a virtual learning environment that address overachievers).

       Actively engaging learners makes teachers develop digital strategies for increasing motivation, deep thinking and creative expression in hands-on activities, in particular to involve learners in a subject-specific issue. This sub-dimension includes, for example, to design multi-sensory technologies to visualize and explain new content, to use technologies in intensive research cycles to solve a problem (e.g. on the real use of water in food production), or to present working results through creative expression, e.g. a poem as a digital story.

      In terms of the competent progression in this field, teachers can, for example, develop from an initial A1-A2 curiosity in achieving inclusion and involvement digitally (e.g. through the basic use of digital animations or videos for hands-on explanations), to creating tailor-made digital resources to assist special needs (B2), to innovating a school’s set of digital strategies for inclusion and differentiation (C2).

      Suitable tools for empowering learners – Taking stock

      Identify digital resources and technologies that you consider helpful to actively engage learners and to cater for inclusion and differentiation needs. Go through the suggestions presented in this article and re-evaluate them from the perspective of learner empowerment, or research suitable tools yourself, e.g. by using the inventory of ICT tools and open educational resources provided by the European Centre of Modern Languages (https://www.ecml.at/Resources/InventoryofICTtools/tabid/1906/language/en-GB/Default.aspx). In what ways can the tools you have selected create more learner-centered classroom activities and methodologies?

      facilitating learners’ digital competenceThe last area can be understood as the culmination of all previous competence domains of educators, when teachers apply their digital know-how to fostering the digital competence of learners (Redecker 2017: 23; 77–87). Within this shift of focus to learners, teachers receive a central role in view of the following five sub-dimensions:

       Information and media literacy: Teachers encourage learners to articulate a concrete information need, then proceed to searching, organizing, storing and analyzing new information, and finally, to evaluate the credibility and reliability of information and its sources. For language learning, learners could work with an online language databank such as the British National Corpus to research collocations. For cultural and global learning, learners could collate different opinions and perspectives on a sustainability issue such as palm oil production.

       Digital communication and collaboration: Here, teachers prepare tasks that require learners to use digital technologies for communication, collaboration and civic participation effectively and responsibly, including, for example, the co-construction of knowledge, awareness of behavioral norms in online worlds, and understanding appropriate digital communication means. For example, learners could design a webinar with an author of the book they are reading, moving from the invitation via e-mail, to the joint collection of suitable questions, to welcoming the guest and hosting the event via a video-conferencing tool such as Zoom.

       Digital content creation: Within this dimension, teachers encourage learners to create learning outcomes and products in digital ways, e.g. by using presentation technologies such as Prezi, or by handing in a working result as a video. The issue of knowing copyright and licensing rules is covered here, too.

       Responsible use: Here, teachers aim at equipping learners with a positive attitude towards digital technologies and ensuring that learners know how to manage their physical, psychological and social well-being, e.g. in view of privacy issues, sharing personal information on social media platforms, or protection from cyberbullying. Such concerns could be turned into relevant project work in which learners move from gaining knowledge of an issue to concrete implementations.

       Problem-solving: Within this dimension, teachers invest continuous efforts to help learners identify and solve technical problems, update their digital competence with regard to new arrivals in the technological and digital world, or transfer available knowledge to new situations. For foreign language education, it makes sense to negotiate and perform such tasks in the foreign language through providing appropriate language (e.g. ‘My device is not working properly.’ – ‘Maybe the batteries need recharging?’ – ‘Oh yes, that is the problem. Thank you.’).

      Regarding information literacy, for example, learners may be good at finding information quickly but they need assistance in terms of how to assess the reliability of the sources of information and how to synthesize information from them. An Integrator (B1) can implement learning activities fostering this competence. A more strategic educator like an Expert (B2) would use a variety of pedagogic strategies to help learners combine information more critically and meaningfully, and more importantly, teach them how to quote sources in an appropriate way.

      digital competence: a life-long challenge for teachersAdmittedly, reading about the digital competence of educators in such a condensed way provides a heavyweight of information that needs to be processed and digested. Therefore, it might be advisable to understand this framework as an opportunity for continuous development – rather than the expectation that all of the 22 sub-dimensions of the six competence areas need to be fully developed all at once. Also, it needs to be said that not all teachers necessarily start at the lowest A1 level, in particular because they might bring many existing skills to their profession which can be fitted into the DigCompEdu framework. Also, not all teachers need to progress up to the C2 level, since this level is primarily concerned with transforming and innovating whole institutions, rather than individual classrooms and learner groups. While for practicing teachers the DigCompEdu can be a source for in-service training to stay up-to-date, pre-service teachers are faced with the challenge of acquiring digital competence already during their teacher education. To shed light on this particular situation, the following section presents how the DigCompEdu framework was explored with an empirical study on future teachers’ digital expertise and attitudes towards digital education. Another issue that may be raised and that we cannot follow any further here would lead to the question whether there may not only be progress but also regressing tendencies, or in other words, whether we are speaking about a necessarily unidirectional development or whether reverse tendencies might be possible, too.

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