Digital Literacy: Role in Instruction

The digital divide and educational inequalities remain a significant societal prob-lem in the United States impacting low income, first-generation, and minority learners. This paper documents the efforts of a mid-Atlantic minority-serving institution as it seeks to assess and address the digital and information literacy skills of underserved students

Digital curation may be regarded as a core competency in higher education since it contributes to establishing a sense of metaliteracy (an essential requirement for optimally functioning in a modern media environment) among students. Digital curation is gradually finding its way into higher education curricula aimed at fostering social media literacies. Teachers are urged to blend informal and formal learning and since most people informally use curation in their daily lives for compiling relevant information, it may be fairly easy to adopt digital curation in teaching and learning. Teachers, however, require considerable insight in incorporating various informal digital curation tools in educational practices.

Digital literacy involves more than the mere ability to use software or operate a digital device; it includes a large variety of complex cognitive, motor, sociological, and emotional skills, which users need in order to function effectively in digital environments.

American University (Washington D.C.) defines digital literacy as the ability to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information on digital platforms, including computers and mobile devices. Digital literacy doesn’t replace traditional ideas of literacy, but rather builds upon them to address competency related to computers and other digital devices, the internet, and social media.

It is necessary to develop digital literacy skills with which students can communicate and express their ideas effectively using digital media. The educational sectors around the world are beginning to incorporate digital literacy into the curriculum. Digital storytelling, one of the possible classroom activities, is an approach which may help engage and motivate students to learn digital literacy skills. To investigate this approach, the present small-scale study employs the methods including interviewing and analysing the artefacts of three students selected from a purposive sample on a multimedia course. The findings indicate that the three students have improved in terms of three aspects of digital literacy skills, namely, digital competence, digital usage and digital transformation regardless of their prior knowledge and levels of digital literacy.

The article examines strategies students can use to determine the credibility and trustworthiness of information they find online. It explores shortcomings with a checklist suggested by digital literacy organizations to evaluate websites and instead discusses a method used by fact checkers based on searching for similar information across multiple websites

All students need digital citizenship skills to participate fully in their communities and make smart choices online and in life. Our award-winning 9–12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum:
- Addresses top concerns for schools.
- Prepares students with critical 21st-century skills.
- Supports educators with training and recognition.
- Engages the whole community through family outreach.

For teachers looking to integrate digital literacy into their curriculum, it is important to start with a plan that includes defining the required skills you expect your students to have mastered by the completion of the year or semester and determining what type of content is best for your class level. Teachers need to ensure that they are directing their digital lesson curriculum appropriately toward each student’s level of development.

The Media and Digital Literacy Academy of Beirut is a short bootcamp-style summer training that provides media and digital literacy mentoring to academics and students in the Arab region along with training in digital content creation. This includes photo manipulation, audio and video editing, data visualization, and social network analysis.

The University of Edinburgh has developed its own course, guiding participants through 23 digital concepts and practices that involve sharing out blog posts upon completing each section.