Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Students must understand how to recognize reputable information and how to identify credible, high-quality journalism. Bias is everywhere, and it’s necessary for young people today to identif…

Even before the pandemic, museums were putting their art online. Here on Open Culture, we’ve covered such ambitious efforts of digitization and making-available on the part of the Rijksmuseum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other major institutions, some of whom have gone so far as to upload their holdings under Creative Commons licenses or in other free-to-use forms. And now you can call forth artworks from the open online collections and others all at once with the search engine Museo.

I've written about Google Classroom's originality reports in the past. I've also posted tutorials on looking for matching documents via Google Drive. This week, thanks to Mike Tholfsen, I learned that my Microsoft-using friends have a similar feature available to them via the online version of Microsoft Word. 

The power of Google search engine lies in its hidden features. Getting precise search results requires much more than simply comping up with a random search query and hitting  ‘I am feeling lucky’ button. Google search is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught to students.

Each week, I publish a post or two containing three or four particularly useful resources on classroom instruction, and you can see them all here.

You might also be interested in THE BEST RESOURCES ON CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION IN 2019 – PART TWO.

Here are this week’s picks:

Checkology is a website designed to help students learn to be discerning consumers of online, print, and television media. Checkology has a free version and a premium version. This review is only about the free version of Checkology.

Google’s Safe Browsing technology examines billions of URLs per day looking for unsafe websites. Every day, we discover thousands of new unsafe sites, many of which are legitimate websites that have been compromised. When we detect unsafe sites, we show warnings on Google Search and in web browsers. You can search to see whether a website is currently dangerous to visit.

DLRP is an evolving collection of tools around areas of youth life that can help you navigate connected learning environments and the digital world.

Created by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society,  materials on the Center’s Digital Literacy Resource Platform (DLRP).

Welcome to the Microsoft Digital Literacy Curriculum. The goal of Digital Literacy is to teach and assess the basic concepts and skills needed to use a computer. Computer technology can help you in your everyday life to develop new social and economic opportunities for yourself, your family, and your community.

Whether you are entirely new to computing or have some experience, this curriculum will help you understand computers better.

The Game is On! is a series of short animated films that put copyright and creativity under the magnifying glass of Sherlock Holmes, providing a unique, research-led and open access resource for school-aged learners and other creative users of copyright. Drawing inspiration from well-known copyright and public domain work, as well as recent copyright litigation, these films provide a springboard for exploring key principles and ideas underpinning copyright law, creativity, and the limits of lawful appropriation and reuse.

Google announced today the gradual release of a new search feature which will help users get more reliable results. Search results in Google will now start showing an icon which when you click on it will display more information about the source site without having to actually visit it.

The Internet Archive warehouses all kinds of fantastic materials (and some not-so-fantastic) that can be useful to teachers and students. The trouble with it is the organization is a little clunky for research purposes. Even if you limit the scope of your search to webpages and text you can still spend a lot of time weeding out material that isn't academic in nature. That could be changing now that Internet Archive Scholar is on the horizon. 

Google Images has recently introduced a new feature that allows users to fact check information on images they find online. The new feature, as Google stated, is geared towards helping users make informed judgements about the visual component of the web. The fact check label added to Google Images provides users with key information about images including contextual data about the origin and authenticity of the visual.Google Images has recently introduced a new feature that allows users to fact check information on images they find online. The new feature, as Google stated, is geared towards helping users make informed judgements about the visual component of the web. The fact check label added to Google Images provides users with key information about images including contextual data about the origin and authenticity of the visual.

Today, as part of its anti-misinformation campagign, the United Nations launched the campaign #TakeCareBeforeYouShare There is a video of the launch press conference here: https://youtu.be/rH8BkTkRFuY They chose to launch on World Social Media Day (30 June),

The visual below features some important  tips to help you better use Google Image in your instruction. More specifically, you will get to learn how to run a reverse image search, how to use advanced Image settings, and how to filter images through a wide variety of usage rights.

Having good digital literacy skills just makes sense in a digital world. The messages we create and consume, along with the information we generate and absorb daily, all require digital literacy skills to some degree. So if you’re new to them, this infographic from Time to Know called Essential Digital Literacy Skills for the 21st Century Worker is a good start.

It was featured on E-Learning Infographics in a post that cites the work of Professor Yoram Eshet, a leader in digital literacy research from the Open University of Israel. 

In many parts of the UK, students who are attending pre-sessional courses are now in the midst of assessments and essay writing. 

Regardless whether learners are post-graduate, graduate or K12 students, it is always worth revising how to evaluate web sources with them. 

Below is a Padlet with suggestions to use with students.

Welcome to the Information Literacy Resource Bank, Cardiff University Library Service’s integrated microsite for our digital and information literacy resources.