Learning Objectives

• Understand the importance of using digital text in teaching and learning.
• Understand the ways that developing digital reading skills can contribute to lifelong learning. 

Reading in the Digital Wilderness

What was the source of the last news that you received? Television? Online news source? Social media feed? Increasingly in the past several years, our news sources have moved from print to digital. Video, article, graphic—each type of media can be used to convey information that is deemed relevant, timely, and of consequence to the majority of the public.

Reading digital text for information or entertainment requires the ability to comprehend and analyze, evaluate, and reflect. Because we know they are not using eBooks or other informational text online for their primary reading source, it is important for digital natives to be exposed to digital text. Skills for determining whether an online article is acurrate, biased, false, or satire need to be explicitly taught. Read more about how INFOhio can help students beat fake news in this Teach With INFOhio blog post.

As students grow, it is important to expose them to a variety of media from both reliable and not-so-reliable resources. The goal is to develop close readers who engage with information to determine whether it is accurate or false. Young adults who have been explicitly instructed to read digital text can be released into the digital wilderness and feel confident about their safety. 

How Safe are You in the Digital Wilderness? 

In a 2016 Pew Internet Research Center Study, 64% of Americans polled said they found made-up news caused "a great deal of confusion." Even adults can struggle to determine whether the information we find online is from a reliable source and is accurate. It requires close reading and comprehension. Try taking this quiz from Media Smarts, Canada's Centre for Digital Media Literacy, to see how well you do in the digital wilderness. \

For more information on how to support instruction in digital and media literacy, check out Developing Digital Detectives: Essential Lessons for Discerning Fact from Fiction in the "Fake News" Era by Jennifer LaGarde and Dennis Hudgins. The eBook includes instructional materials and lessons to explicitly teach reading digital text closely.