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Why Teaching Digital Literacy is Critical Right Now

Teachers, the best and most effective tool for teaching and learning is still you. Please don’t forget that your personality, your strengths and weaknesses, your passions and interests, and your ability to reach your students are what we need most right now, and always, in education.

As I recenlty planned and participated in professional development for teachers, I learned a few ~~handfuls~~ bucketloads of ~~important~~ critical things about the importance of digital literacy. The PD was focused on using technology to create equitable access to instruction for various populations of students: in person, students in blended models, and distance learning.

While we introduced some great tools for learning, and taught teachers how to use them, we overlooked the fact that several of them did not really understand some basic elements of digital literacy. Meaning they did not know what it meant to open a new tab, what a refresh button is, or that files can be stored in a cloud. With all of this pivoting to online and digital instruction, now is a good reflect on what we think we know about digital literacy.

What Digital Literacy is Not

Having the capability to toggle between screens on your cell phone, play a video game, and conduct a google search, does not award you the title of being digitally literate. In fact, I would argue that a lot of us aren’t as literate as we think we are when it comes to the digital world. Most of us were just becoming literate in the basics of reading and writing when the world wide web started to be a thing.

People, this was only a little over twenty years ago. My junior year in high school I was taking a typing course on a typewriter. You guys, I am still super young!

In my experience as a teacher, some kids have had the luxury of having had some digital literacy education, but this is mostly in the form of typing and coding classes. Our little school has an amazing technology and media teacher who introduced Virtual Reality sets as a crazy fun tool for learning and instruction.

My point is, everyone is having to use technology almost everyday now to teach and to learn. Are we doing due diligence in providing the basic, foundational understandings of digital literacy that every teacher and student must have in order to fully access the awesome capabilities and potential that technology gives us?

An Honest Assessment

As with any content, we should have a good idea of what our students already know or don’t know. The following is just a handful of discoveries I’ve made over the past few weeks as I’ve integrated more technology in my work, and at home.

Fewer people understand technology as a tool for solving problems.
Not many people understand what is meant by digital literacy.
Many people need basic digital literacy instruction, including myself.
Students and teachers need instruction on the purposes and tools of email.
Families and teachers need instruction on video conferencing tools, and their purpose
Everyone needs instruction on the purpose of technology in our lives and in education.

What Digital Literacy Is

When we understand that technology is more than our computers, we can begin to grasp the fact that we are in control of it, not the other way around. We use technology. We create tools to help us solve problems. Yay humans!

New literacies, like digital, are changing what it means to be literate, and at a pretty quick pace. Reading and writing skills are just not enough to participate in today’s conversations.

Edweek.org has a great article on what digital literacy is, and it’s not simple:

“Digital literacy is the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.”
American Library Association’s digital-literacy task force

As a good reader, I know to look for keywords in that definition. In order to be digitally literate, we must be able to FIND information, EVALUATE information, CREATE information, and COMMUNICATE information. Let’s just say digital literacy is complicated. Which is why we need to be teaching it.

Digital Literacy instruction is the foundation for equitable access.

Equitable access means more than simply providing devices and connectivity. It also means giving every student the opportunity to learn from teachers who understand how to use technology to both enhance learning and create quality learning experiences for students with special needs.
International Society for Technology in Education

The key here is that students, all students, need the opportunity to learn from teachers who understand how to effectively use technology as a problem-solving tool. Not only that, but the tool should enhance your instruction. Meaning your instruction could still be taught without it, but the technology is making it better. It should not be the reason to teach the lesson. I love Kahoot and Flipgrid, but I know better than to plan a lesson around the tool.

Becoming a Digitally Literate Teacher

So where do we start? How about where we always do. Introduce the vocabulary. We all use the academic language associated with the digital world on the daily, but do we know it? Could you explain what an app is? Can you put into layman’s terms what a window is, or how email works?

Digital Literacy Vocab Cards — Free Digital Literacy Vocab Printable

If you are not a computer science nerd, or whatever that title is now, you might struggle a bit to explain all these terms. So, because I can’t really do it either, I have created this free digital literacy vocab printable for you to use to get things started. Use it to create your own word wall for reference, so we can all begin to create a more equitably accessible world full of digitally literate people!

Teaching the vocabulary is just the beginning. Below you will find three of my essential resources and systems for learning digital literacy as a teacher. This knowledge helps me be better equipped to teach families and students to be digitally literate.

Excellent article on why we must teach Digital Literacy and 21st Century Skills

The Center for Human Technology is working to realign technology with humanity’s best interest.

A Digital Citizenship Scope and Sequence, with lots of free resources

Teaching Your Students Digital Literacy Through Citizenship

What better way to teach something so complicated than to recruit help. Let your students help you help them. Teach them what it means to be a digital citizen! Thankfully, do a quick search for digital citizenship lessons and you will be off and running. Commonsense.org is my favorite resource right now for teaching digital citizenship because it offers complete lesson plans for every grade level!

Students need to know that they have a voice, their thinking matters, and they are welcome to participate in a global world. As a citizen, we have certain responsibilities, the most important being literacy. We have a responsibility to understand one another and to communicate with empathy, clarity, and purpose.

Through citizenship, students will begin to understand their roles as members of our new and changing world. A very big part of that world is digital.

One Example of a Natural Learning Cycle.

It is difficult to separate the teacher in me from the learner in me. Just when I’m not looking, my teacher self recognizes my learner self, and points out something kind of amazing. The teacher in me recognizes that I am naturally engaged in a learning cycle on a regular basis. I am consistently consuming-producing, and reflecting. Gold stars all around. I’m like my favorite student. (Its OK to have a favorite if there is only one.)

The elements of instruction can include several complex details, that I will not (probably cannot) explain here. The purpose of this post is to highlight the natural cycles of learning we may go through in some undefined amount of time, and how much it resembles how teachers intentionally design learning experiences in the classroom. Very scientific, I know.

**Challenge to the reader**: I have included pictures of my chickens, their eggs, and breakfast, see if you can figure out why and leave me a comment!

Start With Bite Sized Bits

One of my favorite books ever! That Workshop Book by Samantha Bennett

Breakfast aside, reading is my consumption choice first thing in the morning. My husband thinks I have a book addiction problem, and I agree. Nonfiction is my drug of choice, but I’m really trying to move into fiction. Most importantly, print is preferable to digital. I need to underline, highlight and make comments in the white space.

Effective lesson design actually begins with the end in mind, but I’m not talking about the planning in this post. ( If you want to see how I plan lessons, check out this post.) After a goal or objective is identified, the teacher presents something he or she hopes the students will consume. Hopefully, the teacher knows learners best consume things in bite size chunks. Even for me, the exemplar learner, I can only consume for about 30 minutes before I start to lose interest.

Thank goodness I’ve learned its more productive to produce something after consuming something, rather than wander aimlessly until I feel the urge to consume again. Doesn’t that sound a little cave woman-like? Anyway, back to me the exemplar learner, not the cave woman.

Build, Create, Write, Draw, Make Something!

The Worktime is the time where the learners make something. The process of making is where the magic is.

Anyone who has been in a second grade social studies lesson knows a good strong economy needs producers and consumers. Even if you don’t remember second grade, you at least recognize those vocabulary words from 4th grade science, right?

Now that I’ve got you thinking about decomposing carcasses and that ultra cool ecosystem you built, we’ll talk about products. While the goal may seem to be consumption in learning, what we really want, eventually, is a product. Now, I didn’t say it has to be a useful product. It is in the process of making something that we find the learning happening.

As I mentioned earlier, there is no shortage of things to learn. We could try to consume our way to knowing as much as possible, but if we never do anything with it, well, we could end up the opposite of full. Isn’t it ironic? A little too ironic? Like rain, on your wedding day? OK, I’ll stop.

After reading, watching, or listening to a bit of content, I usually try to produce something new, or modify something I’ve already started. In order to make something meaningful, its got to come from me. Because I am a good learner, whatever I produce will most likely be heavily influenced by whatever I just consumed. It may be a journal entry, a blog post, or a list. This is how I think, process, and apply.

This is the work of learning, and it is where teachers hope their students are spending the most time. It is the work time, and the biggest chunk of the lesson plan pie. Here is a full post on how I use a workshop wheel to plan lessons.

Reflection is Where The Meaning Is

Here we are now, my favorite part.

Reflection has the very best two definitions ever:

1.the throwing back by a body or surface of light, heat, or sound without absorbing it.
2.serious thought or consideration.

While I could spend some time on the first definition, which would be lots of fun, that’s not really why we’re still here. Thank you for still reading.

#2 Serious thought or consideration. I’m questioning the serious part, but yes, this is the gold. I’ve spent enough time in classrooms to know that it is in the reflection, the debrief, or the closing, where we find out what the lesson was made of.

I spent the better part of an entire year of instruction focusing on how to nurture an environment where student feedback was not only safe, but also expected. Goosebumps happen in a good closing discussion about the day’s learning.

There is always, and must be, time for reflection in any learning environment. How else do you know the time spent was valuable? I guess you could just tell yourself that, or you might even look at student work and make assumptions that it was. But how do you know? In my classroom, discussions were my first choice, but there are lots of other, quicker ways to do it.

While I sometimes do have discussions with myself, I have found lots of ways to be reflective in my individual learning cycles. One of the best ways to get myself seriously thinking and considering is to ask myself questions, and then I listen. Yes, I listen to myself. Its ok, I trust my opinion and think critically before I take any of my own advice.

Here is why this works for me, even if I never consult another human being anywhere in this cycle: I know myself. I know I will continue to learn, consume, ask more questions, produce, succeed, fail, reflect. It’s just who I am, and will always be. I trust the learning process.

Reflection, Feedback, and Coaching

And the cycle is complete, or I should say begins again!

Reflection is one form of feedback, in that it can inform your practice as you thoughtfully consider the value of whatever you have consumed and produced. However, if the feedback is the result of some thoughtful reflections of others, look out.

In my experience with coaching, I was always looking for advice. I practically begged people to tell me what to do to be better. However, the best coaches withheld their great ideas the majority of the time, and instead asked a lot of questions. They highlighted things that went well in the lesson or the learning and asked me why I thought that was.

To really explain this concept, I highly recommend reading The Feedback Fallacy from the Harvard Business Review. Here are two of my favorite sentences from the article:

Learning is less a function of adding something that isn’t there than it is of recognizing, reinforcing, and refining what already is.
We learn most when someone else pays attention to what’s working within us and asks us to cultivate it intelligently.

As a learner, teacher, coach, and a person with feelings, these two quotes make my heart want to jump right out of my chest. I want to make giant billboards and bumper stickers of this.

So, I guess the teacher in me is doing a pretty good job recognizing, reinforcing, and refining the learner in me. I hope I will continue highlighting the things I am doing well as a learner, because I love learning! If you are still here, you must be too! Gold stars all around.

Envision the BEST Education for Our Kids

Since we don’t have any way of knowing what the future will look like, let’s pretend. What is the best possible version of the future we can imagine for our kids? What skills do our kids need in order to be successful not only now, but in the best future we can envision for them?

More Than the 4 Cs

As a teacher, we were constantly talking about 21st Century Skills, and preparing kids for the real world. Our lessons were focused on state standards, and what kids need to be able to know and do in order to be successful.

Education places a heavy emphasis on the four C’s, the skills needed for learning: Critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, and communication. BUT did you know there are EIGHT other 21st Century Skills?

These eight other skills fall under two different categories: Literacy Skills and Life Skills.

While most of my blog topics surround literacy skills, most of my thinking lately has been around life skills.

Life Skills MUST Be Taught

Imagining the BEST possible future for our kids, and ourselves, makes me think about what I know as an adult to be most helpful. The Applied Educational System’s site does a wonderful job of breaking down the following list of Life Skills in greater detail, but here is a summary:

Flexibility: Deviating from plans as needed
Leadership: Motivating a team to accomplish a goal
Initiative: Starting projects, strategies, and plans on one’s own
Productivity: Maintaining efficiency in an age of distractions
Social skills: Meeting and networking with others for mutual benefit

You probably already know how critical these skills are, being an adult yourself. How did you learn to have initiative or be productive? What about those social skills? While I know many teachers are incorporating these skills into their lesson planning, I wonder if they are explicitly naming them for students.

Not only naming them as life and learning skills, but also describing why they are important, and how they use them in their own lives.

Envisioning the BEST Future

The cool thing about envisioning is that you get to use your imagination. When I imagine my future, I wish for a feelings of whole health, relationships that are fulfilling, a sense of participation in, and contribution to, society, and opportunities to explore and be curious. And lots of other things.

Notice those are pretty realistic. I must be all grown up.

If I were to make a list of skills I would need in order to ensure that my vision become a reality, what would they be?

In order to have whole health, I need to establish and maintain good self care habits.
In order to have fulfilling relationships, I need to have compassion, self awareness, and empathy. I also need to be vulnerable, maintain healthy boundaries, and practice being in relationships.
In order to develop a sense of participation in, and contribution to, society, I need to become self aware, reflect on my ideas and abilities, and seek out opportunities where I can make a difference.
In order to explore and be curious, I need to develop a sense of adventure. I need to pay attention to what makes me laugh, what brings me joy, and how to use my imagination.

What can you imagine?

We have a unique opportunity to use our imaginations pretty much whenever we want. This is why I love the words What if…

What if I could do something more to better prepare my own kids for their future? Maybe I don’t need to rely on the public school system so much, and complain that there is so much to be fixed.
What if I read aloud to my teenager, even if she hates it at first? Could it bring us closer together, and give us more to talk about? Could it give her the gift of learning to love to read?
What if online school really is better than public school for my child? Will he learn how to be more self reliant, trust himself to take initiative, and begin to build his own sense of self?
What if this is an opportunity to develop self care habits more deliberately into our own lives, thus communicating this absolute critical message to our families and students?

What can you imagine? What is the BEST possible future for our kids, and how can we start making it a reality today?

Thanks for reading!

Random What If Story Lines From the 19s.

Sometimes we just need ideas that are so far out of the box, so unexpected, that our eyes widen enough to see a bigger picture. One of my favorite things about teaching was the random and wonderful thoughts kids share at any given time.

Back in the 19s

I recently overheard a ten year old talking about something that happened back in the 19s. The 19s? After a moment I realized he was talking about a time that was very long ago. Almost the 1900s. When I say the 70s, 80s, etc, he thinks, “oh, back in the 19s.” Its so mind boggling to me, but this is what I mean. We need more of this kind of thinking.

Pixar storytellers use “what if” as the seed for growing awesome stories. A previous post explains how teaching creative writing in this way made writing stories less stressful, and way more fun for the kids. Most fictional stories can be simplified into a single what if sentence. Think of your favorite movie and try to explain it in one sentence beginning with What if.

The following is a list of wacky ‘what if’ story lines that were made into movies.Not only are the story lines attention grabbing, the characters and special effects in these movies are truly “special,” and they are all from the 19s.

The Dirt Bike Kid 1985

What if there was a motorcycle who wanted to help a boy save a hot dog stand from a mean old tycoon who is going to tear it down? The Dirt Bike Kid is a little known action adventure flick that is nothing short of fantastic. This motorcycle has an attitude problem, but a big heart. Just as you would expect, the motorcycle gets into trouble and gets arrested. As in, the officer actually places handcuffs on the handlebars. You’ll just have to see it to believe it.

Lots of great movies, great music, and well, great everything came out of the 80’s. I thank my lucky stars to have grown up with no internet, no cell phone, and endless hours to watch MacGyver and The Goonies. Angus MacGyver and Mikey Walsh have inspired me to be resourceful, optimistic, and above all, to believe anything is possible.

While The Dirt Bike Kid has nothing on an epic, life changing, timeless story like The Goonies, it resembles it in some ways. The kids are the underdogs, and the heroes.

The Cat From Outer Space 1978

Amazon.com: The Cat From Outer Space: Ken Berry, Sandy Duncan ... — The Cat From Outer Space

Imagine a movie about a talking magical alien cat. What if there was a planet filled with cats that were so highly intelligent that they moved things with their minds? No need for opposable thumbs!

Disney’s The Cat From Outer Space is “Supurr-natural.” Yes, I am quoting that line from the trailer. The humans in this movie are your typical scientists, not skeptical at all that a cat can talk and move things with its mind. That’s what I love about scientists: they’ll believe anything!

Best of all are the special effects. Sometimes you can’t even see the wires carrying that physicist through the air! And when Jake (the alien cat) uses his powers to freeze bad guys, the pixels get a bit fuzzy, but it takes a ton of talent to stand that still.

Blackbeard’s Ghost 1968

Amazon.com: Blackbeard's Ghost: Dean Jones, Peter Ustinov, Suzanne ... — Blackbeard’s Ghost

What if the ghost of a pirate could free himself of a curse by helping others? The mostly drunk, but lovable, Blackbeard the Pirate is my favorite ghost of all time. He fights in his sleep, sings all day and night, and behaves a bit like a toddler who doesn’t get what he wants.

Just try not to laugh when you see how confused the mobsters are when the track coach is able to take them out using his hands in the form of a gun while saying “pow pow.” I would have loved to be in the room when the writers and actors were thinking up this scene.

I need a break from realistic. These quirky and of off-the-wall ideas remind me to be more playful, laugh at silliness, and take myself, and others, a lot less seriously. Some would say life is so confusing as it is, and I agree. Lets stop trying to figure everything out and think of some fun stories to tell instead.

What are some of your favorite story lines? Leave a comment and we could try to guess the movie!