As I have been learning about digital literacy this week, I have repeatedly been struck by the thought that teachers should not think of digital literacy, or even media literacy, as being something separate from the literacy skills we teach daily in our classrooms. Digital literacy is simply the skills that students need in order to successfully exchange information with the digital world. But like all information literacy , students need guidance and teaching in order to maximize and realize their potential. According to Anya Kemenetz, in her article on Mind/Shift called 5 Things To Know About Kids and Their Screen Time, children make up 33% of internet users worldwide (Kemenetz, 2018). This means that children are already impacted by the digital world in a huge way and that we as teachers need to address the growing need for digital literacy.
In my own class I have noticed that while my students are very good at gaming and using platforms like snapchat and youtube, they lack critical digital skills that they will need to be successful both in school and in the work world. My students for example are very unfamiliar with platforms such as Google docs or Google slides that would help them to present information in a new way. My students are also in need of instruction on how to properly use social media as well as how to analyze internet sources and cite them correctly. While this may seem like a lot of extra instruction, i believe that these literacy skills can easily be combined with the literacy skills we already teach. For example, my students are learning how to write opinion essays at the moment. I could easily assign students topic to write on, ask that they find two opposing opinions on their topic online, evaluate the strength of each opinion, and use that information to formulate their own opinion. During the time that my students are writing this essay I could teach mini-lessons on online researching skills, evaluating the legitimacy of sources found online, as well as how to cite online sources accurately. By combining the literacy skills I am already teaching with new digital literacy skills I can find the time in my schedule to teach both media literacy and digital literacy. I also believe that digital literacy presents and opportunity for teachers to help connect what students learn in school with their lives outside of school. I teach at a low income school where students often experience vastly different environments at school and at home. This causes them to feel like what they learn in school does not affect their lives outside of school. But technology use is one of the few things that my students experience in both worlds, and by teaching my students the digital literacy skills they will need to be successful and safe in the digital world, I can help to bring those worlds a little bit closer together. Kamenetz, Anya. “5 Things To Know About Kids and Their Screen Time.” MindShift, 3 Jan. 2018, ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2018/01/03/5-things-to-know-about-kids-and-their- screen-time/.
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Scott Marsden
2/19/2018 01:46:18 pm
Madeleine,
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