4 things to know about teaching digital literacy to refugees
Digital literacy is not a given
The children of these adult refugees don’t struggle as much with technical skills as their parents do because they attend American schools with access to technology.
Access can be a barrier to inclusion
Lack of digital access can hamper refugees in many ways. An
Australian study found that the lack of tech skills and access to technology affected refugees’ ability to integrate into their new communities.
Communication comes in many varieties
There are many slang terms, acronyms, idioms and confusing words like “mouse” rapidly thrown at these new arrivals.
We found a universal language using memes. Often dismissed as trivial and silly, memes can communicate across cultures. The image paired with a caption can immediately convey a message or feeling.
Creating global collaborators
Many refugees have lived in multiple countries, speak many languages and have family members living overseas. A hallmark of being a global collaborator, as outlined in the ISTE Standards for Students, is using digital tools to connect with learners from a variety of backgrounds and cultures, engaging with them in ways that broaden mutual understanding and learning.
Resources for teaching refugees
If you have refugees in your classroom, here are some organizations that offer resources you can incorporate into classroom settings.
The Wonderment. This nonprofit connects students from all around the world in collaborative service projects.
UNICEF. This global organization has up-to-date reports on the refugee and migrant crisis as well as ways you can get involved.
International Rescue Committee. This nonprofit helps refugees resettle in their community as well as provide both international and local resources.
Carrie Rogers-Whitehead is an ISTE member and CEO of Digital Respons-Ability. Her company teaches digital citizenship to refugees and she plans to publish findings about this work
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more on digital literacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+literacy
for more info on refugees and immigrants, pls consider this blog
http://blog.stcloudstate.edu/refugeesandmigrants/
How AR and VR are Being Used to Teach SEL
SEL social emotional learning
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-05-29-how-ar-and-vr-are-being-used-to-teach-sel
In his book, “Experience on Demand,” Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, writes, “No medium, of course can fully capture the subjective experience of another person, but by richly evoking a real-seeming, first-person experience, virtual reality does seem to promise to offer new, empathy-enhancing qualities.” Bailenson contrasts experiencing virtual reality with reading news accounts and watching documentaries. Those latter activities, he writes, require “a lot of imaginative work,” whereas virtual reality can “convey the feeling” of, say, a refugee camp’s environment, and the “smallness of the living quarters, the size of the camp.”
Caldwell—who used Google Expeditions to deliver a virtual reality experience set in the Holocaust—says that when his students first put on the goggles, they viewed them as a novelty. But within a minute or two, the students became quiet, absorbed in what they were seeing; they realized the “reality of the horror of what was in front of them.” Questions ensued.
Ron Berger, the Chief Academic Officer of EL Education, points to another factor schools should consider. He thinks virtual reality can be a powerful way to introduce kids to situations that require empathy or adopting different perspectives. However, he thinks no one tool or experience will bring results unless it is “nested in a broader framework of a vision and goals and relationships.”
Berger says virtual reality experiences have to be accompanied by work beforehand and follow-up afterwards. Kids, he says, need to be reflective and think critically.
immersion experiences like virtual reality should be “embedded in positive” adult and peer relationships. He adds that ideally, there’s also a resulting action where kids do something productive with the information they’ve learned, to help their own growth and to help others. He mentions an example where students interviewed local immigrants and refugees, then wrote the stories they heard. They published the stories in a book, and the profits went to legal fees for local refugees.
saving virtual reality for “very special experiences,” keeping it “relatively short” and not getting students dizzy or disoriented. A report Bailenson co-authored for Common Sense Media highlights the research that has—and has not—explored the effects of virtual reality on children. It states that the “potentially negative outcomes of VR include impacts on children’s sensory systems and vision, aggression, and unhealthy amounts of escapism and distraction from the physical world.”
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The Brain Science Is In: Students’ Emotional Needs Matter
What the neuro-, cognitive, and behavioral research says about social-emotional learning
Teachers, like parents, have always understood that children’s learning and growth do not occur in a vacuum, but instead at the messy intersection of academic, social, and emotional development.
four specific insights:
• Malleability: Genes are not destiny. Our developing brains are largely shaped by our environments and relationships—a process that continues into adulthood.
• Context: Family, relationships, and lived experiences shape the physiological structure of our brains over time. Healthy amounts of challenge and adversity promote growth, but toxic stress takes a toll on the connections between the hemispheres of our brain.
• Continuum: While we’ve become familiar with the exponential development of the brain for young children, it continues throughout life. The explosion of brain growth into adolescence and early adulthood, in particular, requires putting serious work into much more intentional approaches to supporting that development than is common today.
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more on VR and empathy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2015/11/18/immersive-journalism/
more on SEL social emotional learning
https://www.middleweb.com/34563/4-tips-for-teaching-students-sel-skills/
Cryptocurrency scheme is part of wider UN effort to revolutionise aid with blockchain technology, increasing financial transparency
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/feb/06/unicef-recruits-gamers-mine-ethereum-aid-syrian-children
The UN’s children’s agency, Unicef, has launched a futuristic pilot project to utilise the cryptocurrency Ethereum to raise money for Syrian children.
the “blockchain” technology associated with the cryptocurrency – the world’s second largest after the controversial Bitcoin – to revolutionise not only how aid organisations raise money but also to increase transparency in their financial transactions.
Blockchain – which emerged as one of the underpinnings of Bitcoin – is a shared record of transactions maintained by a network of computers. It has become a key technology because of its ability to record and keep track of assets or transactions with no need for middlemen.
With a valuation of some $88bn (£62bn), Ethereum – which launched in 2015 – has an equivalent market value to Starbucks, according to Forbes magazine
The World Food Programme (WFP) has used Ethereum to deliver $1.4m in food vouchers, via the use of iris recognition scanners in camp supermarkets, to around 10,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan,
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more on cryptocurrency in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cryptocurrency
Sea Prayer, a new virtual reality experience
Painted with Google Tilt Brush and written by Khaled Hosseini,
Sea Prayer