Digital Fluency - A Current Trend...and Issue!

In a rapidly changing educational world, life as a classroom teacher is rapidly evolving from the early days of my teaching career. My classroom practice today is so vastly different to when I first started teaching 16 years ago and I often think about many of the changes that have occured. Many of these changes have been influenced by trends and issues in education or the global environment. Core Education recently released their top 10 trends for 2016.  

While many of these stuck out for me as being relevant to my current and future classroom practice, one that particularly captures my attention at present is related to the cultural domain and the need for our staff and students to have digital fluency.

Broadly speaking, digital fluency is a combination of these three concepts:

• digital, or technical, proficiency:
• able to understand, make judgements about, select and use appropriate technologies and technological systems for different purposes; this might include knowing how to use technologies to protect one’s data, digital identity, and device security.  
• digital literacy:
• in digital spaces, being able to read, create, critique and make judgements about the accuracy and worth of information being accessed;
• being fluent in critical thinking and problem-solving online;
• Use digital tools to collaborate and construct information across all relevant and significant contexts
• social competence, or dispositional knowledge:
• the ability to be able to relate to others and communicate with them effectively;
• able to manage one’s identity, information, relationships in ways that are appropriate, responsible, safe and sustainable.

-Core Education 2016

Core (2016) state that Digital Fluency is “Driven by personal responsibility, online identity, digital literacies and citizenship, cyber security, access and equity of opportunity.”  This is relevant to me because as a teacher of a digital classroom where students are 1:1 with Chromebooks and as a Dean in charge of pastoral care, every day I am faced with issues of how to ensure students are able to use the tools available to them in an appropriate manner and how we can equip both staff and students to manage this. I often have to deal with incidents of inappropriate online behaviour, with students not thinking through the possible long term repercussions of posting a comment or photo online. Within my classroom, I often have to assist my students in choosing the best method for presenting their information or teach them how to use a variety of online tools. How to collaborate with others online is also a frequent lesson being taught, as my students interact with others from around New Zealand and the globe. Being able to define the difference between a social versus a learning interaction (for example the difference between a Facebook and an Edmodo post) is also a new skill my students are learning.  

So how does this influence our education system and my practice as a classroom teacher? According to (Resnick, 2002, p.33) “In the years ahead, digital fluency will become a prerequisite for obtaining jobs, participating meaningfully in society, and learning throughout a lifetime.” [via White, 2013]. As teachers, we have a responsiblity to ensure that our students are prepared for the future world they will live in and we already know that technology is playing a major part in this. Rapid innovation is leading to frequent developments in technology and while this is a positive, it also has many pitfalls. Through the Mindlab, we have seen how many of these technological innovations (Virtual Reality, 3D printing and Gamification to name a few) can be used to benefit our students.  We know that as educators, we need to give our students the knowledge and capabilities to succeed in a variety of contexts on a local, national and international scale. We need to ensure that we keep up with the way technology is being used, adapted and also the impact it has in a number of situations so we can not only make decisions about what we do in our classrooms but also in the wider online world.

Online safety and Digital Citizenship are two aspects of Digital Literacy that I feel are two of the most important. Our students need to be aware of creating a digital footprint and how this can not be erased. In the same context, as educators we need to recognise the potential pitfalls that our own online use, particularly around the use of Social Media can create. We need to develop a curriculum that allows the skills required to be digitally fluent to be woven in, as opposed to being done as an add on, which is something I have seen in many schools including my own. By weaving it in to the day to day workings of our classrooms, it does not become stand alone, it becomes a core part of everything we do and this is vital for our students.

Over the coming years, I can only see the need for students to be digitally literate increasing. I frequently need to consider my practice, look forward and identify ways in which I can develop digital fluency within the students that I teach, so that they develop the necessary skills to navigate successfully and safely in an online world. They need to be able to create knowledge, use this knowledge for a variety of purposes and all the while consider how what they do online might impact on others.  

References

Core Education http://www.core-ed.org/thought-leadership/ten-trends

White, Gerald K. (2013) Digital fluency : skills necessary for learning in the digital age. Melbourne : ACER