It’s been quite a month. Highlights for me included hearing NASA’s warning on the radio about a possible upcoming “internet apocalypse” due to the sun’s activities. Then, Ontario announced a new “digital literacy” addition to the English and French language curriculum starting in grade one. Wow! There was one more thing…. oh yes, a partial coup, a rumoured nuclear threat hanging over Europe, and me, sitting here with the other Turtle Islanders suffering in the smoky haze.
Let’s focus on the positive. I’m not here to repeat the stories of the day, as my new friend at the coffee shop said, there’s not much I can do about it so I don’t need to know or worry about it. He was playing Sudoko. A game I’ve never tried. He explained it in a surface way, and then referred me to youtube.
He said he likes to do offline activities like Sudoko to stay off of social media platforms like Tik Tok since he already struggles enough with attention span. (Tik Tok is known to change attention spans).
He confessed he may go to the beach later and snap a “thirst trap” photo – to which I had to ask, what’s a thirst trap photo? I’d never heard the term before.
Celebrating the addition of digital literacy to the curriculum here is big. As I counselled my esl students in class today, if you can name it, you can do it. You need to know the terminology to be able to learn about something.
For example html isn’t that hard. But if you don’t know what html is, then how can you learn css? Similarly, if you don’t know what a digital detox is, how can you do it?