Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

A few days ago we shared with you a new Google feature that allows you to easily fact check online content. Today, we are sharing with you 10 good tips that will enable you to critically assess the veracity and credibility of online content (e.g. news stories).  These are guidelines Facebook Help Centre provided for it users to help them spot fake news. However, these tips can also apply to any other type of content. Students can use them to evaluate digital content and enhance their critical reading comprehension.

In today’s post we are sharing with you four oldei but goodie YouTube videos to help you  teach your students how to navigate the web smartly. As good digital citizens, students need to be educated on the fundamentals behind a responsible and effective use of the Internet. This includes knowledge of how to avoid falling prey to online scams (phishing, identity theft, fraud, etc) and how to act in case they happen; how to appropriately use online content; what or what not to share publicly;  how to protect private information (e.g, home address, phone number, email etc); and how to act in an ethical, responsible and positive way online (and of course offline). Critical literacy is key in the teaching of digital citizenship. It equips students with a critical mindset capable of investigating, scrutinizing, and analyzing digital content from different perspectives. In this context, the videos we have for you today are important contribution to your efforts to raise digitally cognizant students.

Keeping up with national and international events was a lot easier when all the news came from one of three major TV news outlets and a few newspapers like The New York Times. Now, there are dozens of channels, hundreds of newspapers, thousands of bloggers, and tens of thousands of social media journalists -- all trying to get your attention with the latest apocalyptic news flash. Stories based on gossip as much as fact used to be designated yellow journalism. Now, in what has been called a post-truth society (defined by Oxford Dictionary as “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief"), it is the reader's responsibility to differentiate between fact and fake news. Here we will look at some teaching strategies to help you do just that.

One of the problems I've had for a while with traditional digital literacy programs is that they tend to see digital literacy as a separable skill from domain knowledge. In the metaphor of most educators, there's a set of digital or information literacy skills, which is sort of like the factory process. And there's data,…