Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Using Wikipedia in the classroom has been shunned traditionally by some teachers because it is written by volunteers on the internet. But it is precisely that crowdsourced nature that makes Wikipedia such a compelling tool in the classroom, says Nichole Saad, senior program manager for education at Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that owns Wikipedia. 

What does it look like to prepare students to navigate the digital world? This is a question I often tackle in both in my own moments of brainstorming and searching for new resources to share, as well as in conversations with fellow educators.

Finding the right resources for teaching students the basics of copyright— including its limitations such as fair use—is essential. We want to make sure students are prepared to work and create in digital and traditional spaces, too. Both the ISTE Standards and the American Association of School Librarians Standards for the 21st Century Learner address the issues of preparing students to navigate and create in a digital world. Although we know this is important, tackling the idea of copyright and fair use can sure feel intimidating.

That’s why I’m so excited to share the Copyright & Creativity for Ethical Digital Citizens curricula for elementary, middle, and high school students. 

Cultural assumptions about gender and race affect the construction of historical narratives and, as a consequence, the selection of instructional resources and the development of school curricula. Women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ individuals, for example, are generally either excluded from historical narratives or presented as marginalized and passive witnesses to history.

The library is most useful if users understand how to take advantage of its collection and services, so a critical part of a librarian’s mission is to teach information literacy to patrons.

[N.B. You will need to provide your contact details to download this lesson plan.]

Are you looking to build students’ digital literacy skills to better prepare them for success in today’s digital world?

Need a few ideas? We invited educators in our Renaissance Royals™ community to share examples of favorite assignments, projects, or activities they use to help students of all ages build digital literacy skills.

The librarians feel that student use of this Holmes Ancient Objects Collection to interact with history facilitates outstanding information literacy education, especially when it comes to the relationship with the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, which encourages lifelong learning. More than one frame within the Framework concentrates on the experiential relationship between students, objects, and creation. The faculty involved with this project took the guidelines of “Information Creation as a Process” and “Scholarship as Conversation” to create an assignment that gave students the ability to become the authorities, thus establishing a stronger connection to history as a living process.

Does the everyday learning environment provide a range of supports to cater for student variability?

Universal Supports are those that exist in the learning environment, which the teacher does not have to think about or plan for daily. Thus, saving teachers time and energy.

They typically support Finance Assignment Help which are common to several learning activities. Universal Supports include the physical, emotional, and learning environment in the classroom as well as well-established systems and protocols that are so embedded they are simply ‘the way we do things around here’.

Want to know how to create meaningful and Engaging Learning Experiences? Check 6 ways to create meaningful and Engaging Learning Experiences.

When planning a lesson you are considering a wide range of aspects such as learning objectives, differentiation, assessment for learning, literacy and numeracy, homework as well as individual activities and the relevant resources to go with them.

As you probably know Google offers some excellent resources to help teachers make the best of virtual reality technologies in their instruction. One popular tool in this regard is Expeditions. This is  a virtual reality tool built for the classroom to help students join immersive virtual trips all over the world. There is also Google Expeditions Series created with the help of different partners that provide virtual tours of places and citifies from all around the world. Some of these tours have even accompanying free lesson plans teachers and educators can use in class.

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:

This is an excerpt from a book that I have been working on for the last fifteen months. I'm getting close to finishing it. 

Our students have become accustomed to entering a search into Google as soon as they are confronted by a question to which they don’t have an answer on the tips of their tongues. However, if they’re forced to take a few minutes before they search, they often find that they already know the answer. This is why a pre-search checklist should include listing what you already know about a topic. This list can be generated from memory or from notebooks (physical and digital). Not only does this process refresh students' memories, it also saves time in the long-run because they aren't spending time searching for information that they already have.

Commentary: edWeb's Julia Ottesen shares how a free curriculum for K-12 students addresses a wide range of issues, from hate speech to time management.

Digital literacy is a critical element of student success, and an integral part of an individual’s ability to participate and contribute in meaningful ways to the world - academically, professionally and personally.