With digital literacy an ongoing ‘techy’ issue for some ELP learners, a class on the topic offered by ELP’s Wellington centre was incredibly successful. The overriding comment from learners about the course was “More, soon, please!”

The class started with an initial exploration of the basic functions on learners’ devices, then reinforced this by learning the vocabulary for common apps like Google Maps and Zoom.

Next came figuring out how to use Google Chrome, how to search for accommodation, to order a pizza, book a movie online and how to use Zoom.

Guest speakers Jonny Smith from Wellington City Council and Jo Maslin, Manners Street Arapaki library, joined the class to talk about Wellington libraries and to show off the Wellington library’s website – where people can search out and order books online and download movies.

Joining Wellington libraries and accessing all the amazing resources on their website was just another helpful byproduct of the course. As a bonus, a couple of learners signed up for membership, right there and then!

For a fun end to the course, teacher Bridget Porter showed learners how to play fun educational games on Wordwall a great website used by many of ELP’s Welly teachers. After signing up with Wordwall, you can create five free activities and you can also access many other activities created by others in the ‘Community’ section.

The course was over the July school holidays, and a second ‘Digital Literacy’ course could well be back by popular demand – with so much to learn in this important area of daily life.

By the way, Wellington Libraries in conjunction with Wellington City Council also offer valuable free Better Digital Futures courses to members – which our learners say are definitely worth checking out too!