Roadblock on the Digital Literacy Highway by Debra Orellana

Course: LIS 724-10 Media Services and Production I, Professor Katie Kirsch;
Dominican University Graduate School of Library and Information Science, July 2014.

The following post is in response to the the article
In School Libraries Cultivate Digital Literacy by Tonya Roscoria. 

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/classtech/School-Libraries-Digital-Literacy.html

Roadblock on the Digital Literacy Highway
by Debra Orellana

In this article, Tanya Roscoria explains the challenges and obstacles librarians in school libraries encounter in their efforts to provide children with access to technology and provide a learning environment to increase digital literacy.

Roscoria identifies five literacy roadblocks 

as follows:

1. Access to technology
2. Filtering
3. Advocacy for Literacy
4. Instructional Time
5. Teaching Youngsters

After evaluating the five difficulties encountered by school libraries relative to digital literacy, teaching youngsters appears to be the most challenging due to all the variables that must be determined and considered before students should delve further down the digital highway. Age groups and comprehension levels, learning concepts explored using the computer, the amount of computer usage time, purpose and learning outcomes.

Balancing how much technology a young child should learn in a day with the other necessary non-technological skills such as reading and writing by hand, penmanship, spelling vs. typing on a computer keyboard. Learning face-to-face social skills with classmates vs. their attention to a virtual world are very important factors to consider in a child's development and how they develop an understanding of the real world vs. a virtual world. 

Read: https://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs/10_02_05.pdf