If you know how to use a digital device, does that make you digitally literate?

Equating Technology Skills with Digital and Information Literacy

The heading above is one of the points that Amanda Hovious brings up in her excellent post, The presumptions, policies and practices that prevent digital and information learning in the classroom. And yes, she admits that it's a mouthful!

In my work, it's not the teachers who equate technical skills with digital and information literacy, but the high school students. They know their way around a computer, tablet or a smartphone like nobody's business, and Google is their first port of call for research purposes. But finding the correct resource to use, then finding the best information in that resource, and then translating that information into understanding are skills that high school students need work on. 

So they all laugh at me when the first thing I tell them to do when they open a webpage is to read it. Because they don't. They want headings and icons and highlighted words to leap out at them, saying, 'Pick me, pick me!' Actually read the page? No way! I am fortunate to work with students who enjoy reading and to work in a school that celebrates this. So once I impress the importance of reading the text on a page - and not only the obvious text but the links and other details too - they get it quite quickly. 

I agree with Amanda Hovious - these "web reading" skills need to be taught in elementary school, along with traditional reading, to truly turn these children born into a digital age into digital natives.