This chapter consisted of the production, implementation, and evaluation of digital teaching resources for integrating information and communication technologies (ICT) in primary education in Spain. Once the relationship between ICT and education was explained, balanced digital educational materials were designed, taking as a reference the legislative framework of the LOMCE and Royal Decree 157/2022, which establishes the basic curriculum for primary education. The digital resources have covered the different areas of primary education and have been characterised by fostering a balanced digital competence enabling ICT work in a cross-curricular manner in different subjects. They have been put into practice and evaluated to analyse their suitability for primary education. The conclusions drawn show the importance of adequate teacher training to be able to include these resources at educational centres in a balanced way. The main objective of this work is to design balanced digital teaching resources that make it possible to integrate ICT in the different subjects of primary education.
Top1. Introduction
Digital burnout, or the feelings of anxiety, exhaustion, and apathy caused by spending too much time on digital devices, is a growing problem nowadays, especially in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA hereafter). As technology makes us more interconnected and more of us rely on computers, tablets, and smartphones at school, the risk of burning out goes up and up. Digital technologies are playing an increasingly relevant role in education as they are present in our daily lives.
Echeverría (2000) determines that they make new learning and knowledge transmission processes possible, which require new skills that must be learned in all educational processes. Primary Education schools cannot ignore this new scenario characterised by numerous social changes so, according to Area et al. (2020), they must prepare their students to live in the society in which they were born, which entails promoting the development of digital competence in the field of SLA.
To achieve this, teachers must first be digitally literate because of appropriate Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs hereafter) training. In this way they will develop the necessary competences to adjust the methodology used in the SLA classroom to the new reality in which technologies form an essential part of the teaching-learning process. This will allow the use of ICTs as a tool for the achievement of the pupils’ integral development, favouring the global development of the child through the interdisciplinary use of ICTs (Mato-Vázquez & Álvarez-Seoane, 2019).
The aim of this chapter is to offer the use of different digital educational resources for the SLA class in Primary Education in a balanced way, promoting the inclusion of ICTs in the classroom. To do so, we proceeded to design teaching materials trying to assess their viability through their implementation. All of this is based on a theoretical framework in which ICTs and their links with the educational sphere are studied.
The use of these digital resources does not only imply a change in technological aspects, but also a methodological change, as well as a change in the roles of both teachers and students (Nehrvarz et al., 2021). On the one hand, teachers become companions, guides in the educational process, and on the other, students take on a much more active role, constructing their own learning in a much more autonomous way thanks to the scaffolding offered by the teacher. These and other changes are presented and analysed in this chapter, thus assessing the organisational changes brought about by the inclusion of ICTs to avoid digital burnout in SLA.
Based on all these aspects, it was decided to carry out this study, trying to offer teachers a series of digital resources to facilitate the balanced inclusion of ICTs in the SLA classroom and to allow them to reflect on the changes they entail and the importance of adapting to the new reality in which we live.
Considering all the above, it can be determined that the main objective of this chapter is to design digital teaching resources that make it possible to integrate ICTs in the SLA field of Primary Education in a balanced way. In relation to this main objective, there are also a series of specific objectives to make it more particular:
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to know what ICTs are and what their advantages and disadvantages are.
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to value the importance of ICTs as a cross-curricular element in Primary Education.
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to study digital resources and their educational possibilities.
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to produce a series of different types of digital educational materials aimed at working on different competences with Primary School pupils in a balanced way.
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to apply the educational resources created with SLA Primary Education pupils.
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to analyse the results obtained from the implementation of the materials to determine their viability.