Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

This semester I’m teaching a graduate seminar on education and technology for Georgetown University. Over the next two months, I’ll share the experience and highlights in a series of columns for EdSurge with highlights from the course. This is part 3. Read part 1 and part 2.

Digital video has taken the world by storm. Netflix is busy changing television and movies. YouTube may be humanity’s largest collaborative cultural project, aggregating an astonishing amount of user-generated content. The Google-owned service is widely used that it may already soak up more than a third of all mobile traffic.

By now the coronavirus, and the resulting fallout, has impacted just about every family in one way or another. Students are out of school, unemployment is rising and social distancing could take a psychological toll. But not everyone is equally affected.

Nearly 30 million low-income students rely on schools for breakfast or lunch, leaving schools scrambling to make new plans. Fourteen percent of households with school-age children do not have internet access, most of which earn less than $50,000 a year. And research indicates that students from low-income backgrounds could fall further behind their peers if learning stops too long and the country sinks into recession.