The first trimester has ended and our 7th grade Digital Literacy course has come to an end. For those who attended in person or followed along online, here’s a hyper-linked list of the topics we explored:
- OneNote: An Electronic Notebook
- Website Evaluation: Be a Critical Consumer
- Delicious: Social Bookmarking
- Effective Search Strategies: Keywords are Key
- Effective Search Strategies: Alternative Search Engines
- Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons: Rights and Responsibilities
- Photoshop Elements: Basic Image Editing
- Flickr: Photo Sharing Made Easy
As I stressed at the beginning of the year, a single course that meets eight times will not make anyone “literate” in the contemporary, digital sense. Hopefully it was a good springboard, however, for utilizing these tools/techniques in the classroom and building our collective knowledge and skills.
Because this course was new and in direct response to our 1:1 Tablet PC initiative, students and faculty completed an end-of-course survey. The results provide some keen insight into how well “Digital Literacy” met the learners’ needs and raise a few questions concerning how best to proceed in future years. Eventually the complete survey will be shared internally, but for now here are a few of the key points I gleaned from the feedback.
Students Enjoy Adult Interaction
One unique aspect of this course was that the 7th grade faculty attended class with the students. While I had hoped to establish a true culture of collaborative learners, the degree of student-teacher interaction was quite uneven. Some sections were very participatory while in others it felt as though I were teaching two separate classes/groups simultaneously. Survey comments indicated that the students enjoyed learning alongside their teachers when they could interact with them.
7th Graders CAN Be Organized
Anyone who has worked with adolescents (and boys in particular) knows that organization can be a challenge. Colored tab dividers and multiple spiral notebooks are unmanageable for many of our students. However, our shift to using OneNote for notetaking, iFolder for file storage and backup, and Interact for submitting and retreiving homework has helped more than 90% of our students feel better organized and in control of their learning resources. Hearing students exclaim, “I like taking notes and can find all my stuff” is a rewarding (and previously unique) experience.
Online Texts Need to Evolve
While OneNote, iFolder, and Interact received near unanimous endorsements, opinions on online textbooks varied. When asked if electronic textbooks were as good as or better than traditional books, students exhibited a range of responses:
Some e-texts are simply PDF versions of the hardcopy text while others include helpful links and multi-media. Electronic texts will need to evolve toward the latter if they wish to be embraced by students and faculty.
Not Everyone is a Digital Native
Although we like to generalize that today’s students are indeed “Digital Natives” as Marc Prensky describes, we must acknowledge that this axiom is not applicable to all. A small but vocal percentage of our students are not enamored and/or fluent with technology and would prefer, as one stated, “if computers would just go away and we could use pencil and paper again.” While I don’t foresee that happening here any time soon, we should make an effort to identify and support those who, despite their age, are “Digital Immigrants” like ourselves.
Back to the Classroom
With rare exception, students and faculty felt the Digital Literacy course was a good addition to our curriculum and should be offered again next year. While I am happy to assume that teaching responsibility, for the course to truly be effective requires that the themes I present find their way into other classrooms. Learning to search effectively, evaluate websites, cite sources, manipulate images, and all the other skills take time and a meaningful connection to content to master.
Hopefully at some point in the not too distant future we’ll have outgrown the need for a Digital Literacy course because it will become part of the fabric of our curriculum. For that to occur means that although the trimester has ended, the learning must continue. Class, as they say, is dismissed…but certainly not over.