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The Importance of Digital Literacy in Our Digital World

fake, fake news, media
Photo by pixel2013 on Pixabay

This week our topic was about something I find important and something I take very seriously—digital literacy.  It is becoming increasingly difficult for people to decipher what is real and what is fake, and that is a major problem.  And this fake news doesn’t just come in text anymore.  Deepfakes are getting more and more advanced, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we start to see these deepfakes used to propagate fake news in the near future  (if you are unfamiliar with the term deepfakes, I have attached a video below).  Now, these deepfakes aren’t perfect yet, but the technology is relatively new, and with how fast technology progresses in today’s world, this technology is going to improve rapidly.  This COVID-19 pandemic has shown just how big of a problem fake news is in our society.  Every day I see people arguing against information produced by some of the smartest people in the world.  We desperately need more focus on digital literacy in schools.

“Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak.”  This quote comes from a study done by the Stanford History Education Group.  The study aimed to find out how well students were able to judge the credibility of online information, and the results were not great.  I am in the secondary program and my major is social studies and history.  The Saskatchewan curriculum defines social studies as “the study of people and their relationships with their social, physical, and technological environments.” Social studies also sets out to develop literacies including “the use of language and technology, to interpret the world and express understanding of it through words, numbers, images, sounds, movements, or other representations.” With these quotes in mind, I think it would be easy to incorporate digital literacy into my classroom.  I would love to do an entire unit that focuses on digital literacy, digital citizenship, and digital identity.  I think students would really benefit from a unit that specifically focuses on these topics.  I could even incorporate digital literacy into a politics unit as fake news is more prevalent than ever in politics.  In fact, “study after study has found that partisan beliefs and bias shape what we believe is factually true.”

The NCTE Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment have a ton of good goals listed regarding digital literacy:

  • Do students create new ideas using knowledge gained?
  • Do students locate information from a variety of sources?
  • Do students analyze the credibility of information and its appropriateness in meeting their needs?
  • Do students synthesize information from a variety of sources?
  • Do students manage new information to help them solve problems?
  • Do students use information to make decisions as informed citizens?
  • Do students strive to see limitations and overlaps between multiple streams of information?

It is vital that students are able to successfully do all of this and there are a lot of great tools to ensure they can.  The Media Bias Chart is a great way to show students the way in which mainstream media is involved politically, which can help identify potential biases and hidden agendas.  SweetSearch is another great resource.  It is a search engine for students that only pulls results from credible sources.  But there is no completely correct way to teach digital literacy.  The only thing that matters is that it is a topic that you spend some time on in your classroom.

Screenshot of the Media Bias Chart

Thanks for reading! 

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