Digital Literacy

 Digital Literacy 

What is it? 

With a quick overview of what digital literacy is, it is defined to be something requires skills in locating and using information and in critical thinking. Beyond that, however, digital literacy involves knowing digital tools and using them in communicative, collaborative ways through social engagement.

Although going into it a little bit further, it seems to be an umbrella term for many other aspects that go under it such as media literacy and informational literacy. I liked how professor Hiller Spires, a professor of literacy and technology at North Carolina State University, views it. Dr. Spires views digital literacy to have 3 different important aspects, finding and consuming digital content, creating digital content, and communicating or sharing it. 

Finding and consuming digital content

Finding and consuming digital content is very easy and very common nowadays. Communication and education seems to be almost all online now as well. When we are scrolling through our phones to fill time through the day, we are already consuming so much digital content even though we don't realize it. 

Although, as mentioned in the article, What Is Digital Literacy? by Liana Loewus, no one will experience online reading in the exact same way. This is because readers will be able to interact with the reading such as being able to look at different links or videos that may pop up, and some may just scroll through the text and and up on a completely different page. 

Creating digital content

Nowadays we can also hear a lot about "content creators" on social media, which are the people who make the videos we can spend hours watching on our phone. Creating digital content also includes even writing online articles or podcasts, essentially anything that will end up online, that people will be able to access through their own devices. I feel this is an important skill to have, as a lot of things are shifting online, and some jobs even include lots of content creation. 

Communicating and sharing digital content

Communicating and sharing digital content is something that we can all, and typically do a lot. Sometimes we'll see a funny post that reminds us of someone, and we send it to that person. Other times we read an interesting article that we may send to someone who would find it interesting. Even being a content creator is communicating and sharing digital content, because you are putting out your own content for other's to see and learn from or enjoy. 

Resource :

What is Digital Literacy?

Here is a quick and interesting clip that also explains media literacy very well!