Refresh

In October 2013, a team of educators was formed to refresh the Developmental Continuum for Literacy with ICT Across the Curriculum. These educators were Kindergarten to grade 12 teachers, administrators, school counselors, and teacher librarians, who regionally represented Manitoba and included both English and French programs.

Questions that came up through team discussions and while reviewing feedback from educators who have been implementing LwICT across the province included:

How do we make the affective domain more explicit and easy to understand?
How do we make the affective domain seem like it is actually infused with the cognitive domain?
How do we visually represent the relationship between the cognitive parts of LwICT (the inquiry learning process, critical and creative thinking) with the affective parts (digital citizenship, ethics and responsibilities, health and safety)?
Do the current Big Ideas still reflect current promising practice?
Do we still keep two domains (cognitive and affective)?
Do we still need to have ICT Supporting Skills listed on the back of the continuum and referenced on the front of the continuum?
Do we use the updated Bloom’s Taxonomy for the horizontal stages along the continuum?
What do the stages along the continuum represent?
How can we update the descriptors to make them easy to understand?
Do we need to refer to technology in the language of the descriptors?
How do we change the continuum to now also encompass the Senior Years?

The team worked for 18 months looking at each part of the continuum: taking each piece apart; rethinking it; deciding what to keep; what to get rid of; what to update; and what new needed to be created. The final product of the refresh resulted in:

a newly updated continuum that focuses on the learning process;
two sets of guidelines that explicitly state the health and safety and ethics and responsibilities issues students and educators need to think about while using ICT;
and a visual representation that shows the relationship between the learning process and proactive health and safety practices and strategies and responsible behavior and actions when using ICT to support the learning process.

Pilot

During the 2015-16 school year, another team of educators took the refreshed continuum, guidelines and visual representation and used them: in their classrooms with their students; as planning and assessment tools; and as starting points to begin conversations with their colleagues about Literacy with ICT.