Digital Tools for Schools: Digital Literacies

Locating and Filtering of information involves the ability to:

• Assess what information is needed, know how (and where) to find it and how to critically evaluate it.
• Think critically about sources and content.
• Understand and decode visual messages, whether through objects, actions or symbols. 
• Access, analyze, and evaluate information and media through understanding and appreciation of how media texts are constructed and why they are produced.

Academic Applications: When students do research online they need to locate sources that are accurate and have expert data and information. Guiding them away from the default Google, you can help your students by providing them with access to specialty search engines and subscription databases.

Specialized Search Engines:

Google Scholar: Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.

Wolfram/Alpha: Wolfram|Alpha introduces a fundamentally new way to get knowledge and answers—
not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms, and methods. 

Subscription Databases: School purchased databases for student research can be located on the MacDuffie Library LibGuide. These are the best place to begin research since all results are "juried" as relevant, expert, and appropriate for educational use. When students use subscription databases, issues of validity and accuracy are not a problem. Of course locating material that is focused on a topic is always a challenge.

Wikipedia: Before you tear your hair out over Wikipedia consider the benefits of allowing students to use the "references" at the bottom of Wikipedia articles as resources. Students still have to evaluate their sources, but quite often the references at the end of a Wikipedia article can send students to highly academic resources.

Evaluating Resources for Accuracy and Bias

While searching, students should be constantly evaluating for information accuracy, relevance to their topic, and bias. When students read articles, news stories, blogs and advertisements they can be easily mislead by bias. Knowing how to deconstruct media is an essential skill for everyone.

Website Evaluation Tools can be found with the CRAAP Test from CSU at Chico, SPAT which walks students through locating and evaluating websites, and Separating Fact and Fiction from Project Look Sharp.

Deconstructing Media: These resources come from Project Look Sharp out of Ithaca College in New York. Tips for Decoding Media Documents is for teachers to help prepare for a lesson in media deconstruction. 

Attached below are PDFs on Key Questions to Ask When Analyzing Media Messages, and Key Questions to Ask When Producing Media Messages. These documents will guide you in posing questions that will generate deep discussions with students on media and the Internet.

Tools: Using social bookmarking tools, students can share their resources with each other and they can use “tagging” to enable easy searching and to make use of collaboratively gathered resources.

Sharing and Collaboration involves the ability to:

• Use multiple tools to disseminate and share knowledge
• Contribute and build upon already existing content
• Manage personal information responsibly
• Engage in real-life, project-based,experiential learning
• Collaborate and cooperate digitally

​When sharing and collaborating in a digital environment students become producers of content. In this scenario students must learn about their digital footprint, the trail they leave when they actively participate online, how, when and what to share about their personal lives, and the best ways to put a professional face on their online activities.

Academic Applications: 

• Students collaborate on topic-based wikis. These can become living resources for future classes to add to. Within a wiki students can post resources, embed multimedia and discuss research, edit each other's work, comment and discuss.
• Blogs allow students to work individually or in groups to reflect and analyze through journaling. Teachers can use prompts to promote reflection and both students and teachers can add comments.
• Using social networks like Google+, Facebook, Canvas, etc. teachers can create class pages to encourage a sense of community. Informal discussions within a safe online environment also provide opportunities to address online privacy and safety.
• Using blogs, wikis, and any application that encourages student participation and creativity is an opportunity to teach about intellectual property, copyright and fair use as well as ways to recognize bias and media manipulation. Through sites like Creative Commons and Project Look Sharp, teachers can work with students to become responsible digital citizens.

Tools: See the linked pages within this guide for details about each tool mentioned.

Social Bookmarking encourages students to share research and resources through "tagging" and categorized digital bookmarks using tools like Diigo, Evernote and Pearltrees.

Students can collaborate on documents and presentations using synchronous and asynchronous applications like Google Docs, blogs and wikis. While wikis are collaborative, blogs can be used for journaling and documenting research or experiential learning, the collaborative aspect being students posting comments on each other's blogs.

Social and Professional Networking can be used to build networks of students interested in or researching similar topics. Applications like Pearltrees, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ can encourage authentic interaction and collaboration between students and faculty.

Digital sharing and collaboration provides an opportunity to discuss copyright, fair use and Creative Commons licensing. 

Organizing and Curating involves the ability to:

• Manage large amounts of content and data
• Identify relevant, high quality content on a continuing basis, and create collections using digital tools
• Organize content in meaningful ways for personal and collaborative use
• Digitally share content with others

Academic Applications: Once students have located and filtered they need to organize the information and data they have gathered. This is where the skills of organizing and curating come into play. To facilitate curation, students use digital tools to organize information and data by developing collections that can be shared with others. This is a constantly evolving process with several options for the final product, like ePortfolios, blogs, journals or tools like Diigo, Evernote, or Symbaloo for bookmarking. 

Tools: By clicking on the "Bookmarking Tools" and "ePortfolio Tools" links you will be redirected to pages within this guide that provide explanatins, links and tutorials for the tools listed below. Clicking on the links to the separate tools will take you out of the guide and to the site of each tool.

• Bookmarking Tools include - Diigo,  Symbaloo, Evernote, Pinterest, Netvibes, Pearltrees, Twitter
• ePortfolio Tools include - Livebinders, Google Sites, Evernote, Wordpress

Creating and Generating Content involves the ability to:

• Create high quality and accurate online content
• Understand and adhere to the guidelines of intellectual property, fair use and copyright
• Protect privacy and safety in an online environment
• Behave in a professional manner

Academic Applications: This is the literacy where students begin to practice being creators of content by generating content that can take the forms of web pages, media-rich wikis, digital presentations, blogs, podcasts, and professional/personal learning networks.

Students write, record and edit original podcasts or digital stories.

Students move the school newspaper online to a digital presence. This is an excellent opportunity to practice digital citizenship skills, when a school publication goes public to a wider audience than it had when printed on paper.

Students participate in a flipped classroom environment by creating videos and posting them on a YouTube channel created by the teacher.

Reusing and Repurposing includes the ability to:

• Take content and rework it to serve a new purpose (remix, mashup)
• Interpret and analyze data
• Understand the limits of fair use, intellectual property and Creative Commons licensing

Academic Applications: The notion of transliteracy, or of mashing up or remixing content and using it for purposes greater than originally intended is an important topic in education. This is an area that calls for greater attention in the classroom. We do our students a disservice by not addressing remixing and repurposing taught within the the scope of intellectual property and copyright constraints. 

Using tools like Thinglink, students can use maps and images found online and add historically correct idata and information, creating media-rich resources for presentation nad sharing.

Students can create interactive timelines to uderstand chronlogical relationships in history, art, literature, science, etc.

Tools: Thinglink, Social Explorer, Google Maps, Google Earth, TimelineJS, Aurasma

The video below is a TEDx Talk from Warwick, England. The process and importance of Remixing as related to Digital Literacies is discussed. Well worth the 17 minutes it will take to watch it.