Digital Natives
Many of our students are digital natives as they have grown up with digital gadgets from a very young age. These students are great at navigating their devices however from my teaching experience they still lack the knowledge to be able to assess information on the Internet to verify its credibility and accuracy and also to be able to integrate the information in their own writing without copying and pasting. These skills are important for students to move forward with workplaces that require working knowledge of information literacy.
Additionally students need an understanding of how technology and the Internet work together so they can know why certain sites show up first when using a search engine like Google. Boyd claims that students trust the search engine they use to find information but don’t critically evaluate the different links that come up after an initial search has been conducted (2009).
Some students use the same type of literacy in text as they do when constructing e-mails in terms of using shortened abbreviations, lack of punctuation and capitalization, and the use of symbols (Dobson & Willinsky 2009). The video “A Vision of Students Today” mentions students in university will write approximately 500 e-mails per semester and read 2300 web pages and 1300 Facebook profiles in a year (Wesch, 2007). This poll was done in 2007 so it now outdated and those numbers are likely even higher. This puts an even greater emphasis on the need for students to be able to read and write effectively not only in their academic lives but also in their social lives too.
This past year I rarely had my students e-mail me, only in the case where they were unable to print something in the computer lab and e-mailing it to me would help solve the problem. I would be interested to find out and investigate if my students know how to construct a proper e-mail with all the proper headings, subject lines, and closing components filled out properly. Would their text be similar to what they can down with pen and paper in my classroom?
After reading the section on “Computer-mediated communication” from Dobson and Willinksky and talking with other colleagues I see the value of using it in the classroom. From my what I learned from using my Google account for my course work, it would be something I would like to propose for my future students when working on collaborative and reflective work. A benefit of a Google account is it that it allows the teacher to monitor a students work progress. No more excuses of lost writing books, or I forgot at home. With the ability to access it at any time a teacher could monitor how a student’s writing is progressing and keep track of their most recent edit to help with time management. It also allows collaborative work to happen more effectively as students can work on it synchronously or on their own time and do not have to meet together to type it out or wait for one to pass it along.
Image
Appel R. Photographer (2013). Digital Natives. Retrieved July 30th from https://www.flickr.com/photos/novecentino/5451581856/in/photolist
Boyd, D. (2014). It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. Audiobook. Audible Studios.
Dobson, T. & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital literacy. In D. Olson and N. Torrance (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook on Literacy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Wesch, M. (2007), A Vision of Students Today (Video file). Retrieved from https://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=utf-
You connected the readings from Module 4 to very real struggles and teaching hurdles that teachers see on an almost daily basis. Often despite repeated lessons, instructions, ideas, tips, and training, students struggle to use technology responsibly, respectfully, and purposefully. I can still remember being a new teacher and taking the time to explain plagiarism, how to take notes, etc. etc. I thought I was finally doing something right by being proactive. Students worked on their projects and I was so disappointed to discover that my kids still did not have the skills they needed. The next year, I would do things better. When planning my WWII unit, I decided to lead them through some research. I found some texts – websites, books, etc., on Hitler and we went through them together. We talked about what information might be important, what we could read and remember but not write down, how to put this in our own words in our notes, how to keep track of our references, and keeping track of our questions along the way. At the end, we answer the question together “Who was Adolf Hitler?”. A successful learning experience for all! What I discovered later on in the school year was that these skills we had worked on did not transfer out of that context. They could expertly talk about what we did and why we did it during our Hitler research but they did not apply these skills independently.
I think these skills are a monumental part of multiliteracies. I believe that a big part of being multiliterate is the ability to transfer ideas, thinking, and skills in different contexts. While the skills needed for viewing visual texts, reading written word, and listening to text are different in some ways, there are some basic skills that students and adults need to able to use in a variety of contexts and environments. Especially in order to develop the specific skills needed in a specific modality.
The question becomes, how do we facilitate the development of this ability? How do we teach students to read a website or blog with the same analysis as a news article? Or as you mentioned, will students write an email the same way they would a letter or a text message? Not only that, how do we promote the use of these critical thinking skills independently?
I also wonder about the delivery of certain modes in classrooms. Getting students to tweet a 140 character summary of a chapter in the novel or definition in science has been a practice that seems to engage students by using a platform they are familiar with. I think it has a place in educational practices but what kind of message does it send? Without thinking, have we conveyed the message that “text talk” or slang and abbreviations have a larger share of writing? Do students think “It was okay to use it in a tweet so it must be okay in my journal response.”? I’m curious about some of your thoughts on these ideas.
Great post, Rebecca!
I think that we need to get over the idea of content and get into skills. It seems like both of you are saying that while we are ramming our content down our learners throats they discover what we want, provide it and then can’t apply it out of context. This is a pretty regular experience for teachers, n’est pas?
With so much information available online but so little schooling on where it came from and who is providing it, it is no wonder our learners take a lot of it at face value and don’t ask questions–how often do they critically question the curriculum we are providing them? If we as teachers can get over the idea that we are the experts in everything and teach the students how to determine what is important (instead of memorizing and replicating what we/the department of education think is important), we will have more capable citizens in the age of multiliteracies.
Note: This is all easy to say and how one goes about it depends on the situation one is teaching in. Curricular demands in various jurisdictions and within individual schools may vary. I will not bore you with what we are doing in my school because the context will not apply to other places. Good Luck. We are all beginning a process of ‘remediating’ education!
Very interesting and relevant post.
Critical thinking and website evaluation are skills that should be mandatory in high school, if not elementary school. When I used to teach grade 8 Science, the students had to do a science fair project and a huge part of this project involved research and I made it my mission to teach students how to distinguish between a reliable website and one that was not as reliable. I also think email writing and has to be added to elementary school English curriculum. Like letters back in the day, students need to know that importance of intro components and closing components of an email. I used to tell my students that if you email does not have a subject it will be deleted.
In the comment above Alison asks a few questions that I also wonder about:
How do we facilitate the development of this ability? How do we teach students to read a website or blog with the same analysis as a news article? Or as you mentioned, will students write an email the same way they would a letter or a text message? Not only that, how do we promote the use of these critical thinking skills independently?
I think that we need to guide students in developing these abilities, when analysing/reading a website the author needs to be looked at as well as the qualification of the author. Students must realize that the audience of an email is key, when you speak to your mother you do not use the same language as you would with your friends. This is the same when you are sending an email to a teacher.
Social media and computer technologies are here to stay, so it is a must that we ensure that students possess the proper skills to maximize their technology use.