Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

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. 

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.

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.

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.