10 More Lessons in Digital Literacy

This book contains a collection of ten lesson plans based around authentic infographics.

The aim of the book is to help teachers encourage students to engage with information, exchange their views and reflections on the information, and think more deeply and critically about the sources and credibility of the information.

In doing this, we aim to develop some of the most important literacy skills for students engaging in the modern digital world of knowledge creation, exchange and consumption.

These lessons move through common stages of:

• classroom discussion to help students access their existing knowledge and develop their spoken fluency
• comprehension tasks to help students develop the ability to understand text and visual data
• digital research and presentation tasks to help students develop the ability to question and check the credibility of information and think more critically about the motivations behind it
• reflection tasks that help students integrate what they have discovered into their existing beliefs and opinions.

The research tasks include web-based research to check the authenticity of the content and go on to supporting students in the creation of independent research surveys and questionnaires that they share through social groups and networks to validate the information in the graphic.

Each lesson ends with some form of creative output task such as a presentation, article, essay or infographic creation that enables students to share what they have learned.

The lesson plans are not intended as a course, but as projects and activities that can be integrated into existing course materials.

It is also our intention that these materials act as examples on which teachers can create their own materials. To aid this process there is another ebook Exploiting Infographics that explores some skills, process and techniques that teachers can use to create their own materials.