Help Your Students Become Digital Literate

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 violations 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 promote Digital Literacy in your classroom.

1.    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.

2.    Google itself has a Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum that has some excellent materials on topics like:  Evaluating Content Online, Managing your Digital Footprint, and Identifying Online Scams.

3.    Edutopia’s Digital Literacy and Citizenship Round Up has collection of articles, videos, and other resources on internet safety, cyberbullying, digital responsibility, and media and digital literacy.

4.    Toward the bottom of Classroom Aid’s Resources for Teaching Digital Literacy, you will find a variety of tips for helping your students search the web as well as resources for teaching and learning digital literacy.

5.    ReadWriteThink has a variety 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.

6.    We can’t forget about Cybraryman’s list of awesome resources. His Digital Literacy website contains many activities, projects, and websites to use in your classroom.

What are some ways you are helping your students become digital literate?