Digital Literacy


Digital natives.

We’ve heard that term used to describe today’s youth because of their upbringing around technology. We see kids navigate technology and pick things up faster than we can. We assume that since children are growing up around this that they just know how to use it.

In the On Being podcast “The Internet of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Danah Boyd explains how these children didn’t gain this knowledge by being born in their generation. She states, “Young people spend a tremendous amount of time learning how to navigate these tools, these technologies.” These kids know how to work technology because they have played around with it and spent time exploring it. They were not born with the knowledge.

Boyd also gets into how when we hear “digital natives” it gives off the connotation that these younger generations have nothing to learn from us. The truth is, they still need our help learning all of the ins and outs of this digital world. They still need us to help them develop a digital literacy.

Troy Hicks and Kristen Hawley Turner get into digital literacy in the classroom in “No Longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can’t Wait.” When getting into their practices that destroy digital literacies, one of their practices stuck close to home: teachers having students create power points instead of writing papers, assuming that since this is done on a computer, it meets the technology requirements.

As discussed, students usually try to follow the bare minimum when it comes to these projects. Instead of focusing on the topic and having a lot to discuss, they’ll get an overview of facts, meet the slide length minimum, and move on. These projects are boring and require almost no skills in technology. There’s not much there to learn, either.

We really have to make an effort as educators and adults to educate and help build digital literacy in our students. There’s more than just power point presentations for them to create or for even us to use when teaching. There are apps like Kahoot and Plickers that you can involve in the classroom to keep students engaged; involving their cell phones makes the phone less taboo and just another tool for learning. Google also has a lot of apps that can be used to increase technology and tech knowledge.

Our digital natives still have a lot to learn. We need to try to involve technology as much as we can in the classroom and work with a variety of tools to increase digital literacy as well as student engagement.

Comments

  1. Sarah's StoriesApril 1, 2019 at 5:13 PM

    Hi Cheyenne,
    You make a lot of very clear and organized points in your post this week, and I really enjoyed reading it! I love that you mentioned Kahoot! I absolutely love using that in all of my Practicum Experiences. It keeps my students so engaged and they are able to learn so much from a short game. I agree that we still have a lot to learn, and I have enjoyed classes such as this that have allowed me to learn about new technological tools that are beneficial in the classroom, and also ways that technology destroys learning, such as replacing writing assignments with power points, simply to meet the tech. requirement.

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