International Literacy Day
Fostering Literacy Skills in a Digital World
Today is International Literacy Day, and this year’s theme is literacy in a digital world. The essentials of reading, writing, and communicating have remained, in many ways, steady for generations. But the proliferation of technology in daily life brings significant changes for students and teachers. Today’s young readers will see many shifts in the mediums and methods they use to consume, produce, and share written content. These changes have implications that educators need to acknowledge, analyze, and weave into literacy teaching strategies. While there are many changes yet to come that we can’t predict, quite a few are already relevant in present learning experiences. To honor International Literacy Day and take a closer look at this year’s theme, we’ve outlined three ways literacy is impacted by a digital world:
What students read, write, and share has a wider reach than ever.
Perhaps the most exciting impact of technology on literacy education is the element of connectivity — students can find fan fiction written by a peer in another country on the internet, or get retweeted by a thought leader across the world on Twitter. The content that they consume, create, and share has a nearly instantaneous global reach, and they have access to ideas, stories, and perspectives that they never would have touched without digital connectivity. Teachers can capitalize on this connectivity by encouraging students to consider the experiences expressed in writings of people who are different from them, and help them practice engaging in productive conversations. Teachers can also use digital connectivity to stress the importance of strong literacy skills — without the ability to clearly, effectively, and compellingly convey their thoughts, students’ voices will easily be drowned out in the digital world.
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Students will encounter a content from a variety of unregulated sources — and, as a result, will need strong media literacy skills.
Another, perhaps more troubling effect of literacy in a digital environment is the obstacle that many educators, parents, and professionals are presently encountering — not all the information we (adults too, not just students) encounter in digital spaces is regulated, vetted, or checked for accuracy, and that we, as a population of readers, don’t always have the tools to tell fact from fiction. This isn’t to say that no writer has ever written and published a non-factual statement in a print medium, but digital publication and sharing changes the game. Without any kind of vetting system, and such easy, instantaneous sharing, the authenticity of a text is largely up for reader interpretation in a digital medium. This means that teachers need to engage in a conversation with their students not just about literacy skills and good writing, but about identifying sources, recognizing truths, and analyzing a piece for accuracy.
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The relationship between student and text is interactive.
Reading has always been, and always will be, a dynamic, complex experience. Readers establish a relationship with a text, whether it’s an emotional attachment to a character, or an intellectual response to an author’s claim. Readers continually reshape their relationship to a text, and reframe their interpretations based on that relationship. But certain adaptive learning technologies can make that relationship interactive. In digital spaces, readers can respond in-text with teacher visibility, look up vocabulary words instantly, and, in some instructional tools, actually be assessed while interacting with the text. With digital learning, educators are empowered to join the student-text relationship, and employ it as an active, ongoing learning tool.
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