Danah Boyd Digital Literacy "It is Complicated"

 

Digital technology literacy skills will need to continue to develop to keep up with our students on a regular basis. Boyd urges and advises us to continue to learn about Digital technology as consumers and as teachers so that we can properly teach our students without making assumptions about their abilities, strengths, or weaknesses. Keeping a good balance in our classrooms will be always challenging because Youth want to always be with smartphones, and laptops, or have access to use technology without being timed or having any limitations. We must always be interested in and provide access to digital technology to those who do not have it within their reach and advocate for them to have the right to free public education including the technological tools for their learning.

Chapter 7 of Boyd helps us to reflect and see the reality of things that have to do with technology and social media. We must be aware that young people have more power, performance, and capacity than we could imagine. The youth of today and of these modern times are highly skilled consumers to perform on the Internet sites of any resource and platform that they want to learn, browse or explore. Even they are cultural creators who in most cases want to be the center of attention. They are also at the forefront of being able to socialize at international levels regardless of language barriers because they have the high technology of language translators. They love to play video games with their cyber friends of any age, race, sexual orientation, or language with a wide variety of cultural diversity. Young people feel empowered to control and write their own lives and experiences on different social media platforms and blogs.

What we adults can do is update ourselves to be at the forefront of technological advances and not become obsolete like some books or objects that go out of style. As teachers, our interest and duty are that we must be a source of guidance, direction, example, and inspiration so that our young people use technology appropriately and can take advantage of all these resources in a favorable way that adds meaning and value to their daily lives. Our main focus should be that we have to teach young people to have balance and insight when they socialize with people of different ages, different cultures, and who have different perspectives on life. As well as advise and emphasize the importance of privacy and respect for the laws and different points of view. Also, emphasize the importance of not wasting valuable time browsing the internet or spending excessively playing video games. Motivation is also often a barrier to our students' digital literacy. 

Boyd inspires us teachers who are not very experienced with technology to be technology learners in all media and urges us to keep updating ourselves and always keep learning for life and also to continue looking for ways to incorporate technology into our teaching. This inspires us to teach, model, train, and mentor students more effectively and explicitly through digital media literacy.