Digital Literacy: It's Not Just for Fanboys and Fangirls Anymore

A couple of years ago my husband and I went out and bought a video camera. One of the fancy ones that has it's own little hard drive--no need for tapes or discs or anything like that. Why did we do this? I'm not sure, really. We'd become disciples of a couple of vlogs, particularly Brotherhood 2.0, a daily vlog by a YA author and his brother. Although Trent and I had no intentions of vlogging ourselves, we really wanted a camera to play with.

Anyway, we took this camera home and our niece and nephew, who were 7 and 4 at the time, were delighted. We made a little movie, did a little old school movie magic where we made my nephew "disappear," and then used MovieMaker to edit it and add titles and music. Brielle was fascinated. She sat with me for an hour, helping me edit and get everything just right. She and Jacob both were so proud of what we had created.

All that's to say one thing, really: kids love this sort of stuff.

I love the idea of digital storytelling. It's such a great way for kids to express themselves. Our world is ever changing which means that our literacy is changing and kids have to be able to keep up. Some of them are going to learn it whether we teach them or not.

To me, though, it's not as much about them knowing how to use the technology, but getting to see that there are so many ways to tell our stories. This article emphasizes photography, but there is so much kids can do, from video to digital music to websites to digital artwork, the list goes on and on. Maybe a kid's not a writer--that doesn't mean he's not a storyteller. I think the idea here is that we all have to find the best way to tell our story.

Many of us were taught that words are the sole purpose of language arts...but if we look at the words themselves, there is no mention of the written word. There's only language and art. To me, this means that we shouldn't only focus on reading and writing in our classrooms. We should focus on all aspects of language and we should continually relate it back to art. Digital literacy is a great way to do this.

I cannot wait to get into the classroom and start putting some of these ideas into action. Kids are more clever than we are and I can't wait to see what my students come up with.