Digital literacies in the classroom

  What are digital literacies, one may be wondering. They refer to “our ability to effectively make use of the technologies at our disposal”, technically and even socially. That means that a digitally literate is able to, for example, tweet something to someone appropriately – which means that the text is not going to be long (actually it can’t be!), maybe with some abbreviations, sticking to the point and with the people correctly tagged. In short, being a digitally literate implies knowing how to use technology, whom to address and in which way, as well as how to recognise real information from fake.

  Undeniably, we’re surrounded by technology, and education can’t look aside ignoring it. It’s part of both our students’ everyday life, and ours. Especially, in my opinion the focus of digital literacies in the school should be on information: how many times a student who was asked to gather information about a certain topic, appeared with anything but what he was supposed to look for? This happens because he didn't know where to search, or how could he rely on a certain web page.

  In my case, following criteria from lesley.edu, I’ve analysed a couple of web pages with some partners, to determine whether they were reliable and also profitable. Here you can read the website reviews, where we designed a couple of activities for students, as the one in the figure below (ignore the fact that it's a bit too long, first time) using the puzzle maker from Discovery Education. In this activity, students will have to find out the secret message, that is the "real" Sherlock Holmes' saying, by first looking for the words written below, and then the message is revealed.

Source: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/digital-literacies-what-are-they-why-should-we-care