Exploration of 
Literacy Elements

-Joanne M. Glantz

The basics of traditional literacy are the ability to read and write content and to engage in communication including graphical and auditory. Digital literacy has connections and pulls from multi-skills and modalities. Traditional literacy “consumes” information, sound, video, and learning where digital literacy “creates” information, sound, video, and learning.

21^st Century teachers and students, will need to develop the literacies of information described: Locating and filtering, sharing and collaborating, organizing and curating, creating and generating, and reusing and re-purposing (Summey, 2013)

Students should learn in multimodalities, gathering, processing, collaborating, sharing, and creating. By developing these skills rather than rote learning, students will be able to adapt to change.

In order for this to happen, teacher’s expectations must be that students own their learning and to facilitate the learning as much as possible. Administrators expectations will allow for teachers to take risks, explore, and learn with their students. Students with highly developed digital literacy spanning the emergent literacies (Summey, 2013) will be college and career ready.

The obstacles that I see in this process are the testing practices, both local and state mandated. Administrators and teachers focus on the traditional literacy methods being tested using technology as a substitution tool prefaced in the SAMR Model. (Kathy Schrock, 2011). Until we change the testing practices to measure mastery of skills, critical thinking, and effective communication, we will continue to struggle with digitally illiterate graduates.

Kathy Schrock. (2011). SAMR - Kathy Schrock's Guide to Everything. Retrieved March 18, 2017, from http://www.schrockguide.net/samr.html

Summey, D. C. (2013). New Literacies in a Digital World. Developing Digital Literacies: A Framework for Professional Learning.

Redefining Information Literacy to Prepare Students for the 21st Century Workforce

Robert Monge & Erica Frisicaro-Pawlowski

This reading couldn’t be more timely for me. We have identified a need to create a standard lesson plan for doing Internet research. We want this lesson plan to be available across all the curriculums and not just for ELA writing. Building a bridge between traditional and digital is not the only message here, but bridging between scholarly and work environment/classroom disciplines, information literacy (IL) skills are critical.

As defined in the text, there are three types of learning in a professional environment: Formal, Non-formal, and Informal. (Monge & Frisicaro-Pawlowski, 2014) For sake of this review, we will consider the professional environment as the various curriculum students will study in secondary.

Students and teachers depend on standard Google search and some Web 2.0 tools for citing. Originally, we were going to develop a standard lesson with Google Advanced Search, Scholarly, citing lessons and information on how to search the available databases purchased by the library.

After reading this article, we are going to customize lessons to fit the three types of learning and match more closely to career IL. The librarian and I, hope to work with the teaching staff to create guidelines for each of the various disciplines (p. 73). By working with the teaching staff they have by-in and they see why it is important to teach these skills.

We will be focusing on the recommended inquiry-guided learning strategies of Problem-Based Learning and Challenge-Based Learning (Monge & Frisicaro-Pawlowski, 2014) p. 69. Students learning how to search and discover legitimate sources while apply problem-solving and critical thinking skills will make their learning more significant and applicable to carry into the workplace of the future.

The Basics of Data Literacy

In reading The Basics of Data Literacy (Bowen, M. and Bartley, A., 2014) it was apparent to me why this chapter was chosen for an introduction to the essentials of digital literacy. The authors make it very clear that Science is a probabilistic endeavor (p.4) and data literacy is essential to science literacy (p.3).

Data literacies discussed in this chapter were open-inquiry, higher-order thinking skills, drawing conclusions, and messy data. I was particularly interested in the example provided with the dispersion (scatter) of data around averages. Because science in schools often draws conclusions on averages, (Bowen, 2014) this method of examining date by standard deviation offers a more in-depth analysis of data and the opportunity to draw more accurate conclusions.

This has a profound impact when relating to a conclusion of health decisions and social safety, such as cancer treatment or structural material deterioration rates and many other life threatening decisions made daily from data analysis.

Works Cited

Bowen, M. Bartley, A. (2014). The Basics of Data Literacy. Arlington, VA: David Beacom.