Abstract:

Our students live and learn in a world with an overwhelming cascade of information that comes to them from everywhere, and the trend is that this situation will maintain in time or even increase. Everything indicates that their future learning experiences and their jobs will have to do, in most of the cases, with the search, acquisition, process, elaboration and transmission of information.

Our students need to acquire the skills related with this complex process while they learn different topics packed into subjects defined in the curricula. Sometimes, both processes collide and the only loser in the conflict is the student.

There are some methodological approaches that try to include the soft skills acquisition in the development of the students’ learning experience, but they very often treat the Informational Literacy (InLi) activities as secondary ones, stressing the importance of content. Fortunately, there exist a pushing trend in the inclusion of the so-called Twenty-First-Century-Skills or the 4C’s but, in general, the system treats them as a collateral effort to be developed in-parallel with the “most important” curricular activities.

Taking profit of the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme (IB PYP), implemented in our school, we propose to change the point of view and to develop all the activities having in mind the scaffolding of InLi skills, defining the goals for a group of ages and building the activities in terms of students’ progressive acquisition.

This paper presents the next chapter of a previous action plan, for Preschool and Primary School and with IB PYP, to integrate the InLi skills into the curriculum from its very beginning, in an open approach to the mentioned objectives, proposing, developing and assessing every activity in terms of the usefulness of the attained results.

We chose a combined approach of digital-traditional media because our Ss are used to access information through tactile devices but, at the same time, they need to manage different sources in different contexts. In addition, the 2.0 tools available for education, allow an easy and attractive way of building formative assessment activities for Ss, specifically designed to attend diversity and to deepen the knowledge. Even more, as Ss are used to work with those tools, they can be engaged in designing, building and testing their own peer-assessment activities and, in the process, becoming experts in the topic, making their learning experience more significative.

There exist a set of tools specifically designed to help emphasize student-centred teaching and learning experiences. Among them, we chose SMART Learning Suite, as it allows students to develop the whole process of researching, acquiring, processing, rebuilding and presenting knowledge, with the additional features of making it possible to do every step collaboratively. Even more, LAB (Lesson Activity Builder), the gamifying feature included, allows that students can create in an easy way assessment material for their peers: this adds a final step to the process of acquisition those “soft skills” as they need to become specialists in the topic to be assessed, fostering their creativity and challenging their minds to think of how themselves and their mates have learned anything. This final step brings reflection to a basic position, making it a continuous process, introducing metacognition as part of their learning routines.

Keywords:

Information Literacy, Gamification, Assessment, Peer-assessment, Creativity, Student centred learning, 4C's.