Abstract
Digital literacy is a vital skill for teacher candidates to develop and incorporate into their pedagogy. Research has shown that people with low digital literacy are challenged in discerning between legitimate and fake news and has revealed that a high percentage of students access news through social media platforms, creating challenges for assessing information correctly. As teacher educators at a Canadian university we wondered, what is the digital literacy of our future teachers? What are the implications of our teacher candidates’ digital literacy skills in their roles as teachers? Informed by Evanson & Sponsel’s (2019) study, we have surveyed four classes of teacher candidates to gain insight into their news and social site use, their understanding of how fake news impacts themselves and society, and how they are able to evaluate stories of information as being truthful or fake. We present the survey results and our initial work with the teacher candidates, post-survey. This post-survey work features participants from three classrooms in literacy-based courses with educational opportunities centering on how the teacher candidates can be responsive to teaching digital literacy. Implications focus on how teacher candidates incorporate their learnings and teaching resources to foster digital literacy among themselves and their students.
Presenters
Carol Doyle JonesAssociate Professor & Department Chair, College of Education, Niagara University, Ontario, Canada Debbie Mc Cleary
Assistant Professor, College of Education, Niagara University, Canada Laura Hermans Nymark
Assistant Professor, College of Education, Niagara University, Ontario, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Digital Literacies, Disinformation, Teacher Education, Teacher Candidates, Pedagogy
