It means teaching progressively rather than sequentially, which helps learners understand better and more clearly over time.
The content people learn is more important than the order. While it is beneficial to understand the basics, knowing how to use tools can help you understand how to use them in action
It was a way of both encouraging one another to remain critical and supporting one another through adversity in creative ways.
With the internet it is easier to gather different opinions from other cultures and share your own.
Digital skills would focus on which tool to use (e.g., Twitter) and how to use it (e.g., how to tweet, retweet, use TweetDeck), while digital literacy would include in-depth questions:
Digital skills are easier to learn, but digital literacy is your understanding of the tool and how to use it in a classroom setting.
Digital literacy would focus on helping students choose appropriate images, recognize copyright licensing, and cite or get permissions, in addition to reminding students to use alternative text for images to support those with visual disabilities.
This is an important skill to have because plagiarism and copyright are severe issues that cannot allow mistakes in real world situations.
After students have the skill to use multiple platforms, I allow them the choice of which platform to use for the support they need, but I make sure they ask questions.
Platforms can be used for specific situations because some may not be used as efficiently as others depending on the task.
What should they add, remove, or modify in order to communicate better?
Before using a platform, list off why it may be more effective than others and how to properly include it into your lessons.
When we encourage students to use technology, do we remind them of the risks of placing their information online and give them choices of how much personal information to reveal?
Nowadays, people are not careful with what they share on the internet and there are clear repercussions from this.
Do our students recognize the ways in which Facebook’s privacy settings continually shift without user permission, and what posting a photo today might mean for their future employment opportunities?
Consent is not consistently used in platforms and businesses can hide things easily, therefore you must always be on top of platform developments.
We also need to recognize the risks of blogging/tweeting, which include opening avenues for abuse.
Being exposed on the internet gives others an anonymity advantage to cyber bully you
o be honest, I avoid putting my students in high-risk situations, but this does not mean avoiding teaching digital literacy
it is not your job to babysit them and handle their difficult situations, but you can give them knowledge of how to handle situations
It means opening dialogue about why we write in public, to what end, and for whose benefit.
This process helps students think about the consequences and benefits before they post something online to avoid bad situations.
I ask students to tweet to other educators and learners (locally and internationally).
Networking is a huge benefit to an online presence to meet people who can provide you knowledge, support and opportunities.
When working across cultures, we tackle questions of inequalities related to language use (English when my students aren’t native speakers but fluent) and infrastructure (the Internet is slower in Egypt).
Translators in English dominated platforms are not always accurate and can lead to misunderstandings that were not intentional.
These discussions can be fraught with power dynamics, resulting in controversial issues appearing unbalanced as more powerful authors block alternative viewpoints.
Research about a platform’s credibility before using its information because there are possible biases included.
Moreover, it is worth discussing how to enhance accessibility of students’ digital content.
In highschool, I had to redo our robotics website because it made me nauseous just looking at it. It was dated and hard to read
Digital literacy is not about the skills of using technologies, but how we use our judgment to maintain awareness of what we are reading and writing, why we are doing it, and whom we are addressing.
With anything digital there are possible difficulties and ocnsequences because of easy access and lack of regulation towards hate comments or missinformation. Information is spread fast and it is important to know how to use such devices safely.