Do your students have the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using various technologies? Digital literacy is an important topic because technology is changing faster than society is. The same advances that make our work easier—those that make it possible for us to search online databases, text friends, and stream media—also present serious challenges, such as copyright violation and academic dishonesty.
As educators, don’t we all want to steer our instruction away from rote memorization and instead promote higher-order thinking skills (analyzing, creating, etc.)? In addition, don’t we all want to have our students find their own learning resources and be able to analyze them in order to create a more personalized learning environment? And aren’t our goals as educators geared towards ensuring our students have the tools and knowledge they need to be successful citizens after graduation? These are all reasons why it is important to promote digital literacy in your classroom.
Below are a few links to sites that contain activities and lesson plans designed to help develop digital literacy skills in your students.
- The Go Digital – Digital Learning Day has compiled a set of digital tools, resources, and lesson plans recommended by fellow educators from around the country. There’s no need to wait for Digital Learning Day, which is on February 17, 2016, to start using these resources.
- Google itself has a Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum that contains excellent materials on topics such as Evaluating Content Online, Managing Your Digital Footprint, and Identifying Online Scams.
- Edutopia’s Digital Literacy and Citizenship Round Up has a good collection of articles, videos, and other resources on Internet safety, cyberbullying, digital responsibility, and media and digital literacy.
- Toward the bottom of Classroom Aid’s Resources for Teaching Digital Literacy page, you will find a variety of tips for helping your students search the web, as well as resources for digital literacy.
- ReadWriteThink has a number of lesson plans on digital literacy for grades K-12. Each lesson plan contains an overview, standards covered, resources and preparation, instructional plan, and additional related resources.
- We can’t forget about Cybraryman’s list of awesome resources. His Digital Literacy page contains many activities, projects, and websites to use in your classroom.
What are some ways you are helping your students become digitally literate? Email Diana Benner at dbenner@tcea.org and share what you are doing in the classroom. I’d love to hear from you.
Featured Image: Computer by Welcome to All ! ツ from Pixabay
