I taught digital literacy in both my 7-week block and my 3-week block. It was an amazing experience because I already had so much knowledge about it. During my 7-week block, I did storytelling with Scratch and tied it in with CC7.9 and CC8.9 from the Saskatchewan English Language Arts curriculum. The grade 7 and 8’s created a narrative-based story with coding as a secondary objective. I first taught them how to code on Scratch before sending them off in groups.
Some of the stories were based on their experiences (shopping, baking) and others’ imaganery (alien invasion, Santa’s workshop). We discussed how visuals, audio, and interactivity influence audience interpretation when they were going to present, so surprisingly, most had all 3 incorporated. This tied well with the NCTE Definition
Build and sustain intentional global and cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so as to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought;
In my 3-week block, we further discussed digital literacy by discussing fake news, how they obtain their information and watched Behind the Swoosh, which was led by my co-op partner.
Slowly, the students covered the NCTE’s definition of Literacy. The world of digital information is vast, and it’s what most of these kids will grow up in unless an EMP big enough to cover the world suddenly shuts down the entire digital world, the kids will all have to be taught how to navigate this big online/digital world so they don’t succumb to false media and are able to develop their own narratives just like the scratch project.