According to the American Library Association, “to be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.”  That’s quite the mouthful, isn’t it?  What this means is that the concept of literacy is moving beyond the simple ability to read and write.  For educators, this means that we cannot be content with teaching our students facts, figures, or even concepts.  We must now possess the ability to not only answer our students questions, but, more importantly, to teach them how to find the answers to those questions.

In the days when I was going to high school, teachers would have relied on the school library and teaching students how to decipher the Dewey Decimal system and use the card catalog to find books on a particular topic.  While I still feel that these skills are important, we must accept that, in the digital age, students will obtain most of their information from the internet.  Whereas we can generally trust information found in a library to be of some merit, the internet is a quagmire teeming with mis- and disinformation and teaching students to wade through the marshy wetland that is the World Wide Web is of the utmost importance if we want them to succeed beyond high school.

Promoting information literacy in the digital age presents educators with a number of new and exciting challenges.  The students may know more than you when it comes to technology.  If you promote information literacy well enough, their knowledge may exceed yours in other areas as well.  Embrace it!  Give those students the opportunity to shine.  Their successes should not pose a challenge to your authority.  They should speak as a testament to your own successes.