TEXTS ABOUT THE SCREEN-FREE WEEK
18/03/25Last week was the first after the experiment of living without screens during seven days. It was a time to analyse the pros and cons of such an activity and we shared all our discoveries. It was very difficult for some, but the general opinion was that it had a lot of advantages and everybody claimed to have changed their routines in some way.
We discovered that these experiment was not new and that it has been held in USA since 1994. This fact made us realize that screen usage is a worldwide problem.
We found a lot of texts about the perils of screens and, of course, they were all in English. This is what generally happens when you make a search on the Internet, that the vast majority of texts are in English. Nowadays, with the use of Google translator, there are no major problems to understand the gist of any kind of text but it is not a good idea to rely exclusively on the answers provided by AI tools. It is much more benefitial to develop strategies that enable you to understand any kind of text. In this occasion, the texts about screens provided the perfect opportunity to practise how to locate specific information.
The main goal of this activity was not to read and understand a whole text but to be able to find the answer of some questions. The questions were in Catalan and, in groups we had to critically analyze all the aspects of the text to select the correct text from a collection and then locate the answer on it.
Titles and images were useful to discard texts that were not related to the topic, for instance, and they also paid notice to words in bold, that offered hints about where in the text the information would be.
The fact of being able to understand texts that were not adapted was very encouraging too! English is not as difficult as it may seem!












