Importance of Digital Literacy in 21st Century Education

Literacy is the ability to make sense of something, often generalized as the ability to read and write. In many ways, reading is reading, media is media, but in the same way a play places unique comprehension demands on a reader compared to a poem or a letter, so do digital media compared to classic media forms. In the 21st century, new literacies are emerging and digital media forms allow communication to be more nuanced than ever before.

Digital Literacy is about being able to make sense of digital media. This occurs through meaningful and sustainable consumption and curation patterns that improve an individuals potential to contribute to an authentic community. This includes the ability to analyze, prioritize, and act upon the countless digital media 21st century citizens encounter on a daily basis.

Essential skills developed by the digital literacy are:

• Knowledge
• Exploration
• Decision making
  Digital literacy helps students to develop some essential life skills. Few essential life skills that a student needs are as follows:
• Creative Thinking : thinking out of box
• Critical Thinking : ability to analyze
• Empathy
• Communication skills
• Coping with emotions
• Interpersonal skills
• Stress management
• Problem Solving Skills
• Self-awareness
• Decision Making
  Digital skills have become important for work and life:
  Digital literacy is crucial to helping students’ lifelong learners. It helps them essential life skills as well as academic skills.They help students use critical thinking skills to evaluate the quality of digital sources and information,which in turn help students communicate better.
  Digital literacy boosts student engagement. When students use powerful content-creation tools for their assignments and projects, they engage more deeply with content, which helps them better understand information and communicate their knowledge in visually and digitally compelling ways.
  Benefits of digital literacy:
• This boosts student’s engagement.
• Digital literacy helps students stand out from competition in the job market
• This makes your schools more competitive
• Driving digital literacy is easier than you think.
  How parents can cover up their technology gape.
• Keep an open discussion about digital issues
• Keep an open mind rather than fear new technologies.
• Engage with the technology yourself so you can remain credible, model good behavior.
• Seek a balance in digital life.
  How blended learning can be helpful to cover-up POST covid conceptual lackness in students.
  This is the time to move beyond the classroom with blended learning.
• Collaboration: This is most diversified group in education learning. Ranging from technical
  fields to extremely esthetic ones like Arts, music and philosophy.
• Library access: After COVID scenario, since social distancing become a norm, libraries became
  off limits for students. Therefore, providing virtual libraries is the way forward. A one step
  platform to access e-copy of books overcome the need to purchase physical books, which they
  would use only for a term or two.
• Track and Improve engagement
• Personalization
• Reduce stress and increase student satisfaction
• More deeper learning.

So, while concluding all the above discussion, we can say that Digital literacy is the need of the hour in 21st century specially for students. Equipped with the proper digital literacy skills, student can make more of their education ventures even throughout the pandemic period and make the best career development alondside.