In the modern classroom, digital literacy must underpin every lesson

It is a fact of life that children and young people across the world regularly use screens of one sort or another, whether for entertainment or educational purposes.

I have been observing how, over this past year, research led by OUP and other institutions has highlighted how:

-???????The enormous expansion of internet and social media usage has transformed how the next generation learn and engage with information and the sources they use.

-???????The consumption of news via social media means that young people need to acquire skills to discern fact from fiction.

-???????Digital literacy needs to be an integral part of every curriculum to equip children with the new skills needed to navigate in the modern digitized world.?

-???????Digital and blended learning resources are an inevitable part of our future and can enhance the learning process and increase learner engagement for teachers and learners across the world.

During the pandemic, repeated lockdowns led to a significant increase in the need for pupils to engage with the technology around them – regardless of whether they wanted, or were able, to engage with it. Research we conducted during the pandemic showed us that 56% of teachers across 92 countries felt a lack of digital literacy hindered the progress of their students.

All three finalists for Oxford’s 2022 Word of the Year, – which was chosen by public vote for the first time ever last month – demonstrate the power of social media to influence culture and language in the modern world.

The words shortlisted by our expert lexicographers were ‘goblin mode’, #IStandWith and ‘metaverse’, with the public crowning ‘goblin mode’ – defined as a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectation – as the word that best represented 2022.?

Goblin mode and #IStandWith gained momentum online last year, with data showing a 30% increase in searches for #IStandWith in 2022 compared to 2021, while usage of metaverse increased almost four-fold in 2022.

That all three selections for Word of the Year are so clearly related to the internet – with one hashtag, one term relating to an online world and goblin mode spreading widely online – highlights how central the internet has become to our daily lives.

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Our ?report The Matter of Fact?explored fact-finding in today’s world. It revealed that across the countries surveyed – the UK, USA, Mexico, India, and South Africa – 62% of 16–24-year-olds?say that social media plays an important role in helping them to distinguish between fact?and fiction. Google’s own research has found that two fifths of Gen Z will use TikTok and Instagram to find the information they need, as opposed to search engines.

All of this begs the question as to whether we should be worried that young people are relying so heavily on platforms where anyone can post and share information and claim to be an expert.?

There is no doubt that social media and the internet have an incredible power to inform and make information more accessible. However, in a world where social media has also been held accountable for facilitating and accelerating the spread of misinformation, we must also consider the role education plays in helping children use technology in a safe and responsible way. Young people might be able to engage with social platforms and the online sphere?as digital natives,?but this does not mean that they are properly equipped to interrogate what they are reading in these micro-worlds and their own personal online echo chambers.??

This has been acknowledged by the US and UK governments, following Stanford University’s and the National Literacy Trust’s findings, respectively. The former identified a “woeful inability by high schoolers to detect fake news on the internet”; the latter, that just 2% of Britain’s children have the critical thinking skills needed to tell discernibly assess online material.?

Tom Goodwin, futurist and author of Digital Darwinism, recently spoke to our Senior Leadership Team at OUP and spoke about the role of education in a digital age where we have prompts to remembering facts on our devices, but our skills in curating, interpreting and searching for meaning in the information we see is going to be ever more important.

It is increasingly clear that action must be taken, now. There are steps we can take and methods and resources available to initiate a much-needed pedagogic shift?and ensure young people develop vital digital skills.?

The Stanford study showed that students who receive just six lessons in digital literacy were twice as likely to identify questionable sources. That’s six lessons over an academic lifetime;?surely a marginal return worth investing in?(although we could do with far more than six lessons!).??

This approach has?been pursued in other nations, too. Finland was amongst the first to implement a program in 2014 that would help children fact-check. Believing that early-age intervention could address the looming problem of pupils over-trusting online material – OUP found that 42% of 16-24-year-olds use social platforms when looking for facts, compared with 12% of the over 55s?–?they?rolled out a country-wide programme at all levels of education that helped children develop ‘a critical eye’ to news consumed on social media.??

Similarly, trials in Uganda?focused on how teachers can show their pupils to think carefully about information read online in relation to their health. The study?found that, when provided with the right support, students reached more accurate conclusions about their health and wellbeing. This proves that progress can be made in countries where there is limited financial resource too.?

Facebook has been around since 2004, Twitter, 2006, WhatsApp, 2009, Instagram, 2010, TikTok, 2016. It’s likely that we will see even more platforms for accessing content emerging in the future. We’ve seen proven evidence of progress being made in Finland with some educational settings adopting whole-school approaches to build digital literacy – cantered around rigorous academic research – into their curriculums. Other governments have commissioned research into this, too.

For example,?OUP’s Oxford International Curriculum has a focus on developing higher order thinking skills and the series Oxford International Primary and Lower Secondary Computing has a Digital Literacy strand running through it. Now is the time to embed approaches to critical online thinking systematically in the curriculum , across the global educational community – something supported?by the OECD in its 21st?Century Readers: Developing Literacy Skills in a Digital World.

Our research shows that children are heading online to learn and understand the changing world around them and, therefore, it is only a matter of time until digital literacy becomes equally as important as literacy and numeracy in education.

As a publisher of world-class academic and educational resources, it is our responsibility at OUP to embrace the opportunities afforded to us by new technologies with the same rigour and standards we have always adhered to in the development of printed resources. This is why it is so important to blend good and deep pedagogical knowledge with technology to enhance the learning process and increase learner engagement. We look forward to taking learning to another level as we equip students globally with the skills they need to navigate safely and successfully in a digital world.