Digital literacy refers to an individual's ability to use digital technologies and communication tools to locate, evaluate, and create information. It involves skills such as using and understanding information across various digital formats and media, as well as performing tasks effectively in digital environments. Digital literacy is an important component of digital citizenship and is indispensable for education and many jobs that require interacting with technology. As technology continues to evolve, basic literacy must expand to include digital skills to prepare individuals for living, learning, and working in today's digital world.

1. Rafaella Cristina Moura de Souza
DIGITAL LITERACY

2. What is Digital Literacy?
It’s...
 The ability to use digital technology,
communication tools or networks to locate,
evaluate, use and create information.
 The ability to understand and use information in
multiple formats from a wide range of sources
when it is presented via computers.
 A person’s ability to perform tasks effectively in
a digital environment... The ability to read and
interpret media, to reproduce data and images
through digital manipulation, and to evaluate
and apply new knowledge gained from digital
environments.

3. Digital Literacy in Society
Contextualizing...
 Digital Literacy is one component of Digital
Citizenship. Its skills have always been
important. In centuries past, people
communicated via letters. These letters soon
turned into telegraph messages. However,
nowadays, students learn in ways that their
teachers could not even imagine decades ago
when they were in school. They learn
technology just like they do the spoken
language.

4. More than those Digital Literacy’s
characteristics in society...
 Digital literacy is one component of being a
digital citizen - a person who is responsible for
how they utilize technology to interact with the
world around them.
 Digital technology allows people to interact
and communicate with family and friends on a
regular basis due to the "busy constraints" of
today's world.
 Not only do white-collar jobs require digital
literacy in the use of media to present, record
and analyze data.

6.  ...the Digital Literacy is also indispensable to
education, therefore, to students as well as
teachers. It implies the same reading-writing
skills, but without paper, pencils, books, or
lectures. It's purpose-built and student-driven. As
a teacher, we need to provide the following:
 Digital devices such as laptops, iPads and etc, for
daily use
 A digital class calendar with dates, activities, and
other events
 An annotation tool to take notes
 A class Internet start page

7.  A class website or blog
 Student digital portfolios
 Student e-mail
 Vocabulary tool

8. 21st Century Skills
In recent publications, the term competence is
more used than skills, reflecting the need for a
wider and more profound content of the concepts.
The relation between competence and skills is
defined:
 “A competency is more than just knowledge and skills. It
involves the ability to meet complex demands, by
drawing on and mobilizing psychosocial resources
(including skills and attitudes) in a particular context”
(OECD, 2005, p. 4).
Instead of this “therms changing”, the 21st century
skills are:
 play (the capacity to experiment with the
surroundings as a form of problem-solving)

9.  performance (the ability to adopt alternative
identities for the purpose of improvisation and
discovery)
 simulation (the ability to interpret and construct
dynamic models of real world processes)
 appropriation (the ability to meaningfully sample
and remix media content)
 multitasking (the ability to scan one’s
environment and shift focus)
 distributed cognition (the ability to interact
meaningfully with tools that expand mental
capacities)

10.  collective intelligence (the ability to pool
knowledge and compare notes with others
toward a common goal)
 judgment (the ability to evaluate the reliability
and credibility of different information sources)
 transmedia navigation (the ability to follow the
flow of stories and information across multiple
modalities
 networking (the ability to search for, synthetisize
and disseminate information
 negotiation (the ability to travel across diverse
communities, discerning and respecting multiple
perspectives, and grasping and following
alternative norms)

11. Global impact of Digital
Literacy

12.  The nature of knowledge is changing and, in
this digital age, our definition of basic literacy
urgently needs expanding. Those capabilities
that equip an individual for living, learning and
working in a digital society – is one that needs
to be taken seriously by colleges and
universities.
 We, actually, live in an online world, that’s why
who is digitally literate are more likely to be
economically secure and these skills are
especially important in higher education, given
that graduate white collar jobs are almost
entirely performed on computers and portable
devices.

13. Final Considerations
Therefore, Digital Literacy consists of a variety of
skills and competences, and its scope is wide,
covering media and communication, technology
and computing, literacy, and information science.
As an interpretation and summary of connecting
the different approaches, digital competence
consists of: 1) technical skills to use digital
technologies 2) abilities to use digital
technologies in a meaningful way for working,
studying and for everyday life in general in
various activities 3) abilities to critically evaluate
the digital technologies 4) motivation to
participate in the digital culture.

14. Bibliografic References
 http://linked.eun.org/c/document_library/get_file?
p_l_id=16319&folderId=22089&name=DLFE-
711.pdf
 https://cleach.wordpress.com/why-is-digital-
literacy-important/
 http://purposefultechnology.weebly.com/how-can-
we-embed-digital-literacy-in-the-classroom.html