Andrea and Dustin presented this week on how we can foster a culture of lifelong learning in digital citizenship that extends beyond the classroom. The article provided by Andrea, Empowering the Future: How Digital Literacy in Schools is Shaping the Next Generation, discussed the importance of digital literacy in school for reasons such as

• preparing students for the digital world – this has become a common theme throughout our discussions. We know students are surrounded by technology and digital media.
• numerous benefits and skills to prepare for the workforce  such as understanding how to communicate and collaborate, access a wealth of information, and potentially coding and programming skills.

The article provided by Dustin, Digital Literacy: The Most Valuable Tool for Lifelong Learning also highlights the importance of digital literacy skills in your professional life, such as

• Digital etiquette
• Digital security
• Project collaboration

As discussed in a previous week, when integrating digital literacy skills into our teaching, we should be looking at ways to incorporate those lessons and skills into what we are already teaching, vs a stand alone unit or lesson. This fosters the idea of life long learning by providing project based experiences in whatever subject it may be, where students can use the digital tools. I think this ties into the work by Wes Fryer and his various projects he has shared.

When thinking about lifelong learning in digital literacy, I personally am not sure simply adding it into our curriculum is not enough – because we’ve mentioned it before – I think the amount of stuff on teachers’ plates as is may mean that they skip over those digital literacy skills, or maybe they do not have the resources readily available. Maybe it is also a technology equitability piece that is difficult to navigate. Either way – teachers are not and cannot be the only solution (in my opinion).

“Digital literacy education is a collaborative effort that involves not only schools but also parents and the wider community. Parents play a crucial role in supporting and reinforcing digital literacy skills at home.”

This quote was taken from this weeks article Empowering the Future: How Digital Literacy in Schools is Shaping the Next Generation as they describe ways in which the parents and community can support digital literacy skills. Thinking of my own experience this past week, I had to reach out to parents regarding sharing of passwords for our classes Epic! accounts. Although it may be minor as its ‘just Epic!’ (Epic! is an online reading app with lots of books for students to read), even after having discussions with my students about the importance of passwords (I used parts of the commonsense grade 3 lesson on passwords) we were still struggling with this. I think it is important to provide resources to parents as well to help them support digital literacy skills – we do it with reading and writing? why not for the digital world?