Developing Web Literacy in the Classroom: Navigating the winding web of information

Stefanie Partrige
Mar 17, 2018
3 min read

Updated: Mar 18, 2018

Developing Web Literacy in the Classroom: Navigating the winding web of information

This article was written in collaboration with Dominique Patnaik

Dominique Patnaik is a year 2 teacher candidate at the University of Ottawa in the primary/junior division. She has a combined honours in English and History. She can be found online on Twitter (@MsPatnaikTeach) and through her website https://dominiquepatnaik.wixsite.com/loveoflearning.

What is web literacy?

“Web literacy is a term for finding, scanning, digesting, and storing internet information.” (Sutherland-Smith, 2002, p. 663).

When it comes to the world wide web, Canadians seem to be spending more and more time searching information online, so you’d think we’d have its use down pat by now. However, just like a fly interacting with a spider web, navigating the web effectively can be a trying and complex task. Research shows that although young people are using the web in childhood they are still lacking the critical skills needed to effectively navigate web-based information (Hargittai, Fullerton, Menchen-Trevino, Thomas, 2010). This is why schools boards, such as the Ottawa Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) (n.d.) are promoting the development of digital fluency, which is knowing how to work with technology to positive impact learning including interacting, creating, and sharing information in responsible and ethical ways.

Developing web literacy, is one way students can develop their digital fluency. For example, the Mozilla Web Literacy Map (n.d.), is designed to foster critical web citizens through web literacy. This model outlines web literacy as the ability to write, read, and participate effectively on the web and lays out the variety of ways we can teach, for instance, reading text by searching, navigating, synthesizing, and evaluating web-based information.

Why is web literacy important?

But why do we really need to be web literate anyway? One prime example is that students need to know how to search for and critically view web content for school projects and later in life for work and informed citizen engagement. At the beginning of a google search there is so much information to pull from that it can be quite overwhelming and challenging to find quality sources of information. And, the first few finds in a google search are usually ads. Considering these mass content and marketing layers, students need to know how the web functions so that they first understand the main working of the web. From there, students need to learn how to best search, navigate, synthesize, and evaluate all this information.

How to teach web literacy?

One way, to teach web literacy, is through the Mozilla Web Literacy site, where you can show the model and link students to activities related to the model. A second way that we can teach web literacy is through the use of screencast software. The screencast-o-matic (n.d) program allows a teacher to film their every move on a screen. With this function, teachers can film their process of web searching – while talking to their students out loud – to demonstrate how they search, navigate, synthesize and evaluate web information. A screencast lesson is not only an effective way to actively teach web literacy, it provides a multimodal medium that students can see, hear, pause and rewind, making this an inclusive teaching tool to use in the classroom. Having used this program for a few pre-service teacher projects, I can definitely see myself using screencasts as way to teach web literacy in my classroom.

Web literacy is essential for the students of today and fortunately digital technologies provide effective means to teach it!

Hargitta, E., Fullerton, L., Menchen-Trevino, E., Thomas, K.Y., (2010). Trust online: young

adults’ evaluation of web content. International Journal of Communication. Retrieved from ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/636.

Sutherland-Smith (2002). Weaving the literacy web: Changes is reading from pages to screen. The Reading Teacher, 55 (7), pp. 662-669. Retrieved from:http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/

20205116.pdf?refreqid=excelsior% 3A97e7a965f776995189d20147f96756c1

Modzilla https://mozilla.github.io/content/web-lit-whitepaper/

Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. (n.d.). Exit Outcomes. Retrieved from

https://www.ocdsb.ca/UserFiles/Servers/Server_55394/File/Our%20Schools/Exit%20Outcomes/Skills.pdf