What are the Five Digital Literacies?

Curious about the five digital literacies?  Here you go:

1. Locate and filter.  This means effectively sifting through all the massive amounts of information on (and off) the Internet to find reliable resources for accurate and relevant information.
2. Share and collaborate.  When we produce content on the Web, we contribute to the global knowledge base, which is expanding exponentially.  This can take the form of creating a web-based slideshow on Google Slides or maintaining a creative writing blog.  Students can feel greatly accomplished by being part of it!
3. Organize and curate.  Show kids kids how to add additional meaning to content that they've located and filtered using social bookmarking sites like Diigo or curation platforms like Scoop.it.  This helps them learn skills such as how to categorize, group, share, editorialize, review rehash, and archive.
4. Create and generate.  Students can create and generate content on blogs, wikis, or podcasts.  Examples might be a poetry blog, a podcast of rhymes, or digital flashcards to help people study bird species.
5. Reuse and repurpose.  Students take content that's already out there, then use it to serve a new, often unrelated, purpose.  Examples include creating a song mashup (blending two or more recordings to create a new song), creating a timeline of American presidents, or creating a video presentation using existing text, images, video, or other media elements.

If this is all new to you, why not take it in small steps and learn with your students together?  This can actually encourage your students to be more creative, take ownership of their learning, and be less likely to look to you for the "right answer."

Reference:

Sumney, D.  (2013).  New literacies in a digital world.  Developing Digital Literacies: A Framework for Professional Learning.  Thousand Oaks, CA:  Corwin.
 

Digital literacies actually utilize traditional literacies