Digital Literacy Introduction: The Need to Promote Digital Literacy in the Classroom
- Ms. Patnaik
- Mar 16, 2018
- 2 min read
This article was written in collaboration with Stefanie Partridge.
Over the breakfast table, waiting for the bus, on the bus, when your dinner date gets up to use the washroom, in the bathroom, in bed – technology invades every aspect of our lives. Children are not immune to this invasion. According to a 2010 Kaiser (Da Silva, 2015) study on children ages 8 to 18, daily time spent on computers went up from 27 minutes in 1999 to one hour and 29 minutes in 2009. Daily overall media use went up from six hours and 19 minutes in 1999 to seven hours and 38 minutes. This is a massive jump in time in only a decade. One would assume then that school-age children are “digital natives”, a term created by education consultant Mark Prensky. That is, that they know how to use and navigate technology and do not need to be taught skills. This assumption is a little misguided. A study published in the International Journal of Communication (Hargittai, Fullerton, Menchen-Trevino, Thomas, 2010) demonstrated that university students, those that grew up with technology, actually experienced difficulty when being able to research and assess the credibility of sources.
As educators, it is our duty to ensure that our student are prepared from a young age to navigate the digital world. The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) has stated that “digital fluency” is an exit outcome they want for all of their students (n.d.). We need to teach our students skills to become digitally literate: knowing how to use, create, and understand in the digital world. This is so much more than teaching students how to use a program on an iPad. This is teaching students skills in how to access appropriate and trustworthy information online; how to “read”, use, and create multimodal texts, including texts unique to the internet such as blogs, videos, and social media; as well how as how to be a responsible digital citizen, and to understand the impact of our online presence.
My colleague Stefanie Partridge and I have created a series of blogs that delve into how we promote digital literacy in our classrooms. We examine the importance of teaching digital literacy so that children can access assistive technology to help them learn, developing web literacy skills ensuring that children can efficiently use the internet and create digital content, creating digital citizens where students understand the role they have in an online world, and finally, how we go about selecting relevant digital tools for our classrooms.
We hope you enjoy these posts, and that you gain some ideas for how to effectively incorporate teaching digital literacy in your classroom!
Stefanie Partridge is a year 2 teacher candidate at the University of Ottawa in the primary/junior division. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Human Kinetics and Masters of Arts in Human Kinetics. She can be found on Twitter (@Stef_Partridge) and through her website: https://spart033.wixsite.com/stefaniepartridge.
References
Da Silva, J. (2015). Children and electronic media: how much is too much? American
Psychological Association. Retrieved from
Hargitta, E., Fullerton, L., Menchen-Trevino, E., Thomas, K.Y., (2010). Trust online: young
adults’ evaluation of web content. International Journal of Communication. Retrieved
from ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/636.
Media Smarts (n.d.). Digital Literacy Fundamentals. Retrieved from
Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. (n.d.). Exit Outcomes. Retrieved from
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