What Do You Think About Digital Literacy?
- Take an activity that you have done with your students in the past that had an impact on digital literacy (or build upon a past activity to make it better support digital literacy). Write a short description of this activity, describe how it develops digital literacy, and relate it to one of the “types” or “levels” of digital literacy described in the readings. Try using Mozilla’s Web Literacy tool to develop learning outcomes for your activity.
Last year while teaching a grade 6/7 split I developed a task for my students on Microsoft Teams that entailed students navigating to a research article and compiling research into a short slide show. The task was developed for the health curriculum and was about substance abuse:
Curriculum Outcomes:
Describe and assess strategies for managing problems related to mental well-being and substance use, for others (grade 7)
strategies for managing personal and social risks related to psychoactive substances and potentially addictive behaviors (grade 6)
Building Student Success – B.C. Curriculum (gov.bc.ca)
The task utilized the research program “World Book Student” WBO Student | Home Page (worldbookonline.com) which is a great tool to introduce students to researching for specific information. Students were instructed to type in “substance abuse” into the search bar and click search. The first article that pops up is “addiction”, and students were to use this specific article to add content to their own PowerPoint slides on addiction. Topics that were required to be covered were: defining substance abuse and addiction, types of treatments, symptoms, and prevention WBO Student | Article (worldbookonline.com) .
This task touches on some of the aspects of digital literacy but not all. By referencing BC’s digital literacy framework (the Mozilla link isn’t working to reference that particular curriculum) we can determine what digital literacies are addressed:
1. Research and Information Literacy Students apply digital tools to gather, evaluate, and use information.
- The task requires students to utilize worldbook to retrieve content and apply it to their powerpoint project
- Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making:
Students use critical thinking skills to plan and conduct research, manage projects, solve problems, and make informed decisions using appropriate digital tools and resources.
- Creativity and Innovation Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology.
This task does not address digital citizenship, technology concepts and operations, and collaboration (it was an independent task, but students could message each other and their teacher through MS Teams). Please note I could not compare to the Mozilla curriculum as the link does not work (which is why I used the BC Digital literacy framework):
https://learning.mozilla.org/en-US/web-literacy
Province of British Columbia. (n.d.). BC’s digital literacy framework. Retrieved from https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/education/kindergarten-to-grade-12/teach/teaching-tools/digital-literacy-framework.pdf
