Digital Literacy For Elementary Students: Where To Begin
In the digital age we are living in, digital literacy skills are very helpful for the success of the learning process.
When I was an elementary student, my Mom taught business education, and one of those classes was typing. But ironically, I did not learn how to type until I was in university. Now referred to as keyboarding skills, I can attest that these skills are invaluable.
Digital literacy can be defined as “the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.”
Students of all ages learn best by doing. In order to effectively and efficiently use technology in the classroom, students require basic and intermediate digital literacy skills.
Basic digital literacy skills are the foundation. These skills should be the first to be taught and practiced in an elementary setting. These are skills such as:
How to safely transport a laptop or tablet
Powering on/off
Logging in
Remembering and not sharing username and password
Measuring daily screen time
Keyboarding skills and shortcuts
Once students are proficient with these basic skills, these intermediate skills can be introduced:
Cut/copy/paste
Placement/resizing of objects
Video instruction
Audio functions
Screenshotting
Document creation and naming
Conventions
All these skills can be introduced, practiced, and scaffolded into daily learning activities. Elementary students will be most successful in a closed digital community that their teacher has previously navigated and modified to suit their particular academic learning needs.
These skills can be taught, practiced, and experienced in tandem with curricular learning outcomes in English Language Arts & Literature and Mathematics while engaging in our student learning activities in our K-6 Learning Library.
Your child or students will have the opportunity to practice a blended learning style with both digital and non-digital formats that not only develop robust digital literacy skills but also academic expectations.
An added perk is that parents or teachers can digitally interact with their child or students in real-time to provide assistance and constructive feedback in demonstrating and developing these digital literacy skills as our student learning activities function as a shared online learning tool.
This type of learning creates autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
If you are wondering how you can help your child or students develop these skills, here are some great resources to get you started:
All of these resources include engaging instructional videos, audio functions and high-definition images. These resources can be used both digitally and non-digitally at home or at school.
Thank you for reading this blog post on where to begin with digital literacy for elementary students.
The lesson plans in our K-6 Learning Library will help you and your child or students right now and for years to come. The best part is you can edit these resources so that your child or students can focus on what they can do right now and build on it rather than internalize that they are not performing at grade level.