To start with what is digital literacy? Digital literacy is defined as an individuals’ ability to locate, understand, and share information using many forms of digital platforms. According to the National Council of Teachers of English also known as the NCTE, digital literacy is “one of the primary information sources of the modern era.”

The digital world is filled to the brim with information, the problem is, distinguishing the real information from the fake. So how do we help students to be prepared for the online world? Teaching digital literacy needs to start as soon as students are online. As an early elementary educator, it will be part of my job to teach students about digital literacy. In the early years I believe a lot of digital literacy learning will be done through the teacher modeling the behaviour, as they guide students through the process of searching for information. In the Social Studies Curriculum, it talks about the importance of inquiry, and how students are to become active in their discovery of new knowledge. Part of this process is understanding how to search for “real” information. By modeling this behaviour during lessons where we share information from online we are starting to build the foundation for the students’ digital literacy learning.

As students get older and are in higher grades, we can start with more hands on learning in regards to digital literacy learning. The article Fake News. It’s Complicated, talks about taking time before deciding to share something you find on the internet. We need to teach students to second guess the information their reading, fact check, or even check with a peer or educator.

Dealing with fake news is becoming increasingly difficult, in the article Developing Literacies: What We Need to Know in a “Fake News” World, Alec Couros and Katia Hildebrandt list techniques and strategies for dealing with fake news:

  1. Deploy and employ investigation techniques
  2. Use rich examples

and

3. Nurture a critical disposition

With our help students can more easily identify websites and articles that are filled with “fake news” or information. Teaching them to use different tools to evaluate a website can be an effective way to identify if a source is valuable or not.

Part of teaching students about digital literacy and fake news is helping them to understand their own biases. It is easier to accept something as true if it aligns with our biases even if they are not true. In the article Why do people fall for fake news?, it talks about biases and specifies that “we are inclined to trust people we consider a member of our own group more than those of a different group.” Being aware of these biases helps us with seeking information that is factual and not just information that we think is real because it is shared by someone we think to be trustworthy.

Sometimes we need to think outside of the box that is our current knowledge.