When talking about digital literacy in the subject areas I hope to teach in, physical health and wellness is something that I have seen being misleading, untruthful, and overall the opposite of healthy sometimes. So many ads on my tik tok for you page are AI calorie counting apps which can be helpful for some but also create an unhealthy relationship with food for some users. I also get lots of workout routines that are advertised as “quick results” on Pinterest which is creating an unrealistic goal and expectations.

Math is where I was a bit stuck on why digital literacy would be so important because most times math only has one answer. I was taken back when watching both of these TedTalks about media literacy.

Now that I am aware of this I think a great way to share this information and expand on digital literacy in math would be to explore in a statistics unit how and where we may see misleading graphs and stats and how to spot what is true and what maybe adjusted to look a certain way. Diving in even further you could tie it into an assignment where students gather their own stats, display them as they were taken but also create a skewed infographic to compare to the actual data.

I think digital literacy can be both useful and enjoyable to learn in a classroom as we encounter fake news/info daily on tik tok, instagram, YouTube, and so many more platforms all in the palm of our hand. Most YouTube videos use “click bait” as a way to get people to click and watch their videos but in reality they are stretching the truth. In the article Why do people fall for fake news?  They talk about how fake news isn’t something new it has been around for a while now. They go on to explain how and why people might fall or believe it to be true and the reasoning behind it. It’s an eye opener for sure because I am guilty of seeing something and questioning “how could someone believe that, It’s so obvious its fake” but have probably scrolled past and fallen for the next fake thing.

I think I need to dig further my own digital literacy skills and learn more than the surface things I have caught onto during my time on the internet. It’s actually a very interesting topic to me and I think going forward I would like to challenge myself to think using what I have learnt about digital literacy in my own life online.