How many times have you heard or have you said, “Use your common sense!” In today’s digital landscape, telling students (or anyone) to use their common sense to evaluate information that they find may actually be leading them astray.  In this podcast, we demonstrate how our teachers are using quick but relevant 22nd century digital literacy strategies to help students evaluate claims made by news articles.  Try them yourself!

Access our digital literacy strategies poster here.

Access the problem we demonstrate here.

When sending students to the open internet to research, one site teachers generally forbid students from using is Wikipedia. Teachers protest that anyone can edit Wikipedia pages, but is that really the case? Are we creating unnecessary friction for our students by forbidding its use? Join us as we rethink how our digital natives should use Wikipedia and strive to remove the friction from our students' search tasks.

Everyone should be a tiny bit skeptical about what they consume on the internet; but how do we teach students to embrace their inner skeptic? And how do we help students develop transferrable skills so that they can adapt as technology changes?  Join us as we rethink what we’re clicking on - even if we think it’s coming from a trusted source.

Notes: Collins, C. (2021, August 16). Reimagining digital literacy education to save ourselves. Learning for Justice. https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/fall-2021/reimagining-digital-literacy-education-to-save-ourselves

Anyone can be deceived by content they find on the internet, including us! We ask students to critically examine content on the internet every day, but sometimes we need to practice what we preach.  Join us as we use our lesson in humility as a larger lesson for students (and anyone for that matter) to always stop and check your emotions before amplifying any content that you stumble upon. 

Is there a difference between "searching" and "researching" on the open Internet?  Absolutely!  Join us to explore these differences and to see how to reframe the language around these concepts when working with students. 

Notes:

Nichols, T. M. (2017). The death of expertise: the campaign against established knowledge and why it matters. Oxford University Press. 

Our "digital natives" have a digital literacy gap.  Identifying and seeking to bridge that gap has led us on a quest to rethink how we approach digital literacy in schools, particularly with respect to how we guide students in their forays on the open Internet. Our mission is to provide some guidance for how we can all begin to integrate simple classroom strategies to fill the digital literacy gap so that our “digital natives" become truly digitally literate. Today we discuss our initial steps in this quest.

Notes:

Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Wineburg, S., Rapaport, A., Carle, J., Garland, M., & Saavedra, A. (2019). Students’ civic online reasoning: A national portrait. Stanford History Education Group & Gibson Consulting. https://purl.stanford.edu/gf151tb4868