1/09/2012

Contributing to digital literacy

Most teachers think about digital literacy on a daily basis even if they don't use those exact words. Instead,  conversations center around the "junk" kids find on the internet. Or maybe they complain about students believing that a human can also be part tree because of what they saw online. The solution is typically to chat with the kids about taking ideas with a grain of salt. We teach critical reading, listening and thinking. As always, we are hard at work teaching our charges to be literate about their world.

There is a part of digital literacy we don't always think about, however. That is, we are often responsible for putting content online. Is the content we add valuable? Is it authoritative? If you are on Twitter, consider the things you post. Every time you link one of your posts to a blog, you increase it's rank in Google search. If you comment on blogs, those comments add context to the original post. Your online footprint adds to what is online.

Since we want our students to be able to evaluate internet material for bias, authority, timeliness and relevance, we have to do more than just talk a good talk. We need to do what we can to add to the quality of the internet. In many ways this is a classic dilemma for every teacher. Our calling is to teach kids how to be upstanding adults. Our actions in public teach students more about how to be grown up than anything we say in class. In the same way, we teach kids to be good digital citizens. We must therefore be careful about what goes into our online footprint.

1 comment:

  1. Couldn't agree more. This is something that I have recently been striving to do more of as I learn more about what digital citizenship really means. For starters, I have been showing my students the hazards of blindly downloading and using any image they find through google and using it in their social networks or other publications they have going. I have been directing them towards sites like flickr for creative commons instead to show them what it looks like when you truly have someone's permission to use their content. This is a life skill that is applicable in more than just this situation as restraining yourself from doing something until you have permission to proceed is a very profound form of respect. Nicely put, Ben.

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