AI Library: Digital Literacy in Education

To be digitally literate, one must demonstrate five key competencies. These are known as the pillars of digital literacy:

• Information and data literacy: To articulate information needs and to locate and retrieve digital data, information and content. To judge the relevance of the source and its content. To store, manage, and organize digital data, information and content.
• Communication and collaboration: To interact, communicate and collaborate through digital technologies while being aware of cultural and generational diversity. To participate in society through public and private digital services and participatory citizenship. To manage one’s digital presence, identity and reputation.
• Digital content creation: To create and edit digital content. To improve and integrate information and content into an existing body of knowledge while understanding how copyright and licenses are to be applied. To know how to give understandable instructions for a computer system.
• Safety: To protect devices, content, personal data and privacy in digital environments. To protect physical and psychological health, and to be aware of digital technologies for social well-being and social inclusion. To be aware of the environmental impact of digital technologies and their uses.
• Problem solving: To identify needs and problems, and to resolve conceptual problems and problematic situations in digital environments. To use digital tools to innovate processes and products. To keep up-to-date with digital evolution.

In students, digital literacy presents as several skills.To support digital literacy development if they are integrated into the goals of classroom instruction. These skills and an interpretation of how they are represented in the context of digital literacy are described here, and broad understanding of the digital world and the tools required to navigate it. Students who possess digital literacy will be able to: 

• Fact check information
• Identify reputable sources and conduct research 
• Participate in online communication
• Cite sources and copyrighted material
• Discern biases from word choice and sentence structure
• Find and identify images and videos

To teach digital literacy, it helps to become digitally literate yourself. Or, you can take a course focused on helping teachers learn how to teach digital skills. Once armed with these skills, there are a number of steps educators can take to actively and passively teach digital literacy.

1. Emphasize the importance of critical thinking
   This will help students learn how to evaluate information resources to identify bias, point of view, motivation and more from particular resources. Being a good online citizen means using only reliable information, and that starts with understanding how to think critically.

2. Provide guidance on how to avoid plagiarism
   Finding reliable and trustworthy resources is one thing, but properly using and citing these resources is another. Throughout their education careers, students will conduct lots of research activities, and they need to know how to properly cite their resources without copying them word-for-word. Teach bibliographies, APA and MLA formats, and of course how to cite online information to ensure students avoid plagiarism.

3. Teach students to manage their online identity
   As they say, social media is forever, so what students post now will still be accessible when they’re adults. This will matter when applying to college or to jobs, so students want to be sure they cultivate a positive online identity. 

4. Help students manage digital distractions
   With omnichannel access to the digital world, it’s easy to get distracted by the online world. Teach students about boundaries, setting limits and the importance of not spending every waking moment online. This will not only help protect their eyes, but it will also ensure they are exposed to a variety of resources and experiences.

5. Teach students about online safety
   There are billions of people online, so ensuring a student safely uses digital technology is imperative. Parental controls are a good start, but students also need to know how to protect themselves.

Some Tips for Teaching Digital Literacy Skills in Your Classroom are the following:

• Support foundational skills. Although the goal is to integrate digital literacy work into academic activities, it is important not to ignore the reality that some learners will have little or no foundational skill. 
• Teach the vocabulary of computer skills. Learners need to understand and use the language of computer skills.
• Integrate technology. Provide ample opportunities for use of technology both in class and out of class. 
• Emphasize access. Make use of the devices that learners own so that they can develop comfort using them in new ways. Teachers must attend to issues of Internet access. 
• Use relevant technologies. Determine what learning management system or other workforce or educational technology is used in targeted postsecondary programs or sites of apprenticeship or employment.

These days, most careers and work environments utilize a myriad of technologies, and employers want to know that their job candidates will be able to keep up. Digital literacy is commonly defined as a soft skill since it’s less about one specific technology (the likes of which are changing daily) and more about the ability to learn and adapt to technology. That said, being digitally literate is not the same thing as being a good learner. To shed some light on this in-demand skill, we asked hiring managers to explain what they mean when they ask for digital literacy in their fields. Depending on the industry, the specific skills that fall under digital literacy will build from there.

5 Digital literacy skills employers want to see

You can see why different skills within digital literacy would matter depending on the career you are headed for. "We asked hiring managers to share some of the important digital literacy skills they look for and why.

1. Independent research

“A lot of digital literacy is figuring out how to use technologies that you've never seen or only have a cursory knowledge of,” says Cross-Smith. “The ability to independently research and problem-solve speaks volumes of a candidate's knack for adapting to dynamic technical landscapes—an incredibly valuable asset.”

In the technology industry, Cross-Smith explains that her company’s product continually updates and evolves, and the same should be true of the people working on it. “The technology industry is made for life-long learners. If that's what you're hungry for and you have the chops to prove it, you're in the right place.”

2. Familiarity with terms and common platforms

You might not think of a term like Wi-Fi as special knowledge, but thirty years ago, it barely existed as a concept. There are many terms the average internet user knows, and many you could understand with a little extra reading. “Digital literacy means that you know your way around the digital landscape,” says Shayne Sherman, CEO of TechLoris. “It doesn't mean that you can write applications or install and configure a new LAN in the office. But you should know what I mean when I say these things.”

3. Collaboration

“Playing nicely with others might not seem like a starkly digital skill, but you're part of a team,” Cross-Smith points out. “When that whole team is part of an ecosystem that uses a bouquet of different technologies, being able to marry collaboration and independent problem-solving makes true digital literacy a well-rounded professional characteristic.”

Additionally, many employers rely on digital tools and software to facilitate collaboration. You won’t have to be a power user of every individual platform from day one, but having the ability to navigate without much trouble is valuable.

4. Adapting to new technology

One of the most important aspects of digital literacy is the ability to adapt very quickly to new technology, according to Miro. “You need to keep an open mind to innovation whenever it's implemented within your office.”

While we all love reaching a certain comfort level with our day-to-day work and the processes surrounding it, the world isn’t frozen in time. New tools, technologies and software will be rolled out, and you’ll need to be comfortable with adjusting when needed.

5. Teaching or explaining technologies you use

This could matter in many different ways. Maybe you will teach a new recruit how to use the technical tools they'll need on a daily basis, Cross-Smith suggests. Maybe you will need to translate the way you use a particular platform in a cross-functional team. “Digital literacy is both understanding and imparting knowledge on a continual basis. It's important because you'll be on both the learning end and the teaching end of technologies for the rest of your career.”

To know more go to https://www.rasmussen.edu/student-experience/college-life/what-is-digital-literacy/