IMPORTANCE OF DIGITAL LITERACY IN EDUCATION

Genalyn M. Garcia

We are living in a world where the power of social media and internet are everywhere. These has both advantage and disadvantage especially in education. To avoid the disadvantages, I believe it is our job to harness it and help our students to be responsible media user.

According to Barbara Jones-Kavalier, digital literacy represents a person’s ability to perform tasks effectively in a digital environment, with “digital” meaning information represented in numeric form and primarily for use by a computer. Literacy includes the ability to read and interpret media (text, sound, images), to reproduce data and images through digital manipulation, and to evaluate and apply new knowledge gained from digital environments. Moreover, according to Gilster, the most critical of these is the ability to make educated judgments about what we find online. This means that digital literacy does not simply means computer literacy. As we move towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution, our learners must be equipped and skills to meet the demands of the future workforce.

It is the mission of our department to develop lifelong learners, in which they can easily adapt to changes. As the saying goes, we cannot give what we do not have, for us to develop and mold such students, we must be competent and skilled as well. We must embrace changes in the department and we must empower ourselves through capability-enhancement trainings on the enhancement of digital literacy.

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The author is Teacher III at St. Vincent of Quebiawan Integrated School