Digital Age Literacy

• Digital citizenship• Global/Cultural awareness• Research/information literacy• Effective use of real-world tools

Design developmentally appropriate learning opportunities that apply technology-enhanced instructional strategies to support the diverse needs of learners.

Defining Digital Literacy

Digital literacy represents a person’s ability to perform tasks effectively in a digital environment. Literacy includes the ability to read and interpret media (text, sound, images), to reproduce data and images through digital manipulation, and to evaluate and apply new knowledge gained from digital environments.~Excerpt from: Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century

Instructional/Intervention Implications

• Define-Ability to identify and appropriately represent information needed• Access-Develop a search strategy to locate information within a database• Manage-Organize information according to a classification scheme for later

retrieval• Evaluate-Evaluate information and its sources critically and incorporate

selected information into his/her knowledge base and value system• Integrate-Summarize information from a variety of sources and then draw

conclusions from that summary compare and contrast from multiple sources

• Communicate-Create a single persuasive slide to support a position• Create-Create a visual representation of data to answer a research

question, adapt, apply, and design information

The National Education Technology Plan 2010 (NETP) calls for revolutionary transformation rather than evolutionary tinkering.

The NETP presents a model of learning powered by technology, with goals and recommendations in five essential areas: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity.

Learning

The challenge for our education system is to leverage the learning sciences and modern technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all learners that mirror students’ daily lives and the reality of their futures. In contrast to traditional classroom instruction, this requires that we put students at the center and empower them to take control of their own learning by providing flexibility on several dimensions.

Assessment

The model of learning requires new and better ways to measure what matters, diagnose strengths and weaknesses in the course of learning when there is still time to improve student performance, and involve multiple stakeholders in the process of designing, conducting, and using assessment. In all these activities, technology-based assessments can provide data to drive decisions on the basis of what is best for each and every student and that, in aggregate, will lead to continuous improvement across our entire education system.

Teaching

Just as leveraging technology can help us improve learning and assessment, the model of learning calls for using technology to help build the capacity of educators by enabling a shift to a model of connected teaching.

Infrastructure

An infrastructure for learning unleashes new ways of capturing and sharing knowledge based on multimedia that integrate text, still and moving images, audio, and applications that run on a variety of devices. It enables seamless integration of in- and out-of-school learning. It frees learning from a rigid information transfer model (from book or educator to students) and enables a much more motivating intertwinement of learning about, learning to do, and learning to be.

Productivity

Education has not, however, incorporated many of the practices other sectors regularly use to improve productivity and manage costs, nor has it leveraged technology to enable or enhance them. We can learn much from the experience in other sectors.

The Microsoft Digital Literacy curriculum has three levels.

• The Basic curriculum features a course called A First Course Toward Digital Literacy. This course teaches the value of computers in society and introduces you to using a mouse and the keyboard.

• The Standard curriculum features five courses that cover computer basics; using the internet and productivity programs; security and privacy; and digital lifestyles. These five courses are available in three versions that use examples and screenshots from different versions of Windows and Microsoft Office. Please read the details below.

• The Advanced curriculum features four courses that cover creating an e-mail account, creating a great resume, searching for content on the World Wide Web and social networking.

http://www.netliteracy.org/digital-literacy/

http://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators/curriculum

Resources

ResourcesInternet resources:http://www.digitalliteracy.gov/http://digitalliteracy.us/ http://cct2.edc.org/dig_lit/web/http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/ConnectingtheDigitalDotsLitera/157395 http://www.ictliteracy.info/http://digital-literacy.syr.edu/ http://www.scribd.com/doc/80056986/14/MIDDLE-HIGH-SCHOOL-BOOK-APPS http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2009/08/12/100-super-useful-sites-for-high-school-students/