What is the Digital Literacy: Skill Training for Kids & Teens?
The purpose of the Digital Literacy: Skill Training for Kids & Teens program is to educate children and teenagers about the potential risks and benefits of using social media. Through this program, we aim to provide children with the knowledge and skills they need to safely and responsibly navigate the online world at their age.
The event - An Overview
Digismartkids Digital Literacy Training for Kids and Teens was made possible by the collaboration between BSIT and BSCS students from the University of San Agustin. The event took place in a video conference through google meet and was held for two days during the month of December 2022. The aim of the event was to spread digital literacy and awareness among young teens, specifically around the ages of 13 to 15 years old. By enlightening these young participants about what truly underlies the world of digital and social media, we the instigators and coordinators of the event believe that we can prepare them for the dangers and pitfalls they may face one day.
The underlying problem
The importance of digital literacy cannot be overstated. According to recent statistics, more than 5.07 billion people use the internet, which makes up a whopping 63.5 percent of the global population today! These numbers are only expected to grow further into the future, and eventually, everyone in the world will have access to this information superhighway. However, this of course comes at a cost. With so many young people having access to the internet, it’s going to be quite worrisome to think about all the dangers they may come across online.
According to the Philippine Institute of Development Studies(PIDS) in 2021, only about 40 percent of Filipinos actually possess at least one of the ICT skills based on the standards set of the Sustainable Development Goals. Only 58 percent of employers in the whole country said that they were able to provide digital skills training for their employees. To top it off, digital literacy tends to be the lowest among those between the ages of 10 to 14 years old and those who are 65 years old and above.
In order to overcome whatever issue they may come across in the future, children need to be taught how to be self-sufficient, confident, and become well-distinguished users of technology. Following that, they must be able to acquire and develop critical and analytical attitudes in order to be able to use whatever tool or knowledge they are given for specific situations and circumstances. Otherwise, they’ll not only fall behind, but also will be in great danger when they encounter certain things on the internet that they do not understand.
Goals of Digital Literacy Training for Kids and Teens
One of the goals of the Digital Literacy Training was to overcome this issue and to allow as many young teens as we can muster to help them develop the competence they needed in order to ensure their own safety and to thrive in this day and age. We need to be able to provide them with the ability to access, evaluate and analyze information sources so that they can make informed decisions when needed. In order to achieve this, we had set up our young participants the opportunity to participate in the discussions and we allowed them to think critically by asking them provoking questions so they may be able to better understand and come up with their own answers.
Next, by teaching them to communicate and collaborate, we also hoped to enable the young participants to learn how to communicate, collaborate, and network with others. With this strategy, we would be able to allow them to learn the value of collaboration as a life skill whether outside or inside the digital world, teach them to interact effectively with other people on the internet, allow them to understand basic social norms and etiquette when communicating online, and enable them to learn from one another through their interactions. To achieve this, we had a group chat for them to share their own thoughts and experiences with one another. Additionally, we had them understand the value of respecting others in the online world and how their posts and comments can affect other people online.
Lastly, of course we wanted to help these young teens understand the fundamentals of internet safety especially about knowing the value of privacy, using privacy settings, and knowing what and what not to share in social media. This will also allow them to understand the risk of cyberbullying and to actually seek help when they ever experience it themselves. So we could achieve this, we showed the students how to protect their data when browsing the internet. We taught them how to use the privacy settings, read privacy policies, and even reminded them to be careful about what they post in social media as some people may tend to overshare information about themselves without them noticing.
Day - 1
The events of the first day all transpired during the 13th of December. It was an engaging and enlightening event for everyone involved. During the first day, many of the young participants were already pumped up and were already surprisingly familiar with many of the topics presented on screen. It was also apparent that everyone had fun during the talk which was held by Gmar Sazon and Alfonso Miguel Gullo. Some of the topics that they covered involved internet privacy settings and policies, social media addiction, cyberbullying, self-disclosure, sexting, red flag feeling.
The first major topic that I’d like to mention was about privacy. The participants were taught about how they can protect their privacy by understanding privacy settings and privacy policies. They were taught how to turn off cookies in their browser settings, opt out of information sharing when not necessary, review privacy policies, and by using the ASK(accessed, shared, known) method in order to analyze how certain apps can affect their privacy.
The next essential topic was about social media addiction. Here the participants were made aware of how certain social media platforms and apps were designed to become addictive and to make them understand how to have a healthy media balance.
Finally, the participants were made aware of the significance of age in terms of using the internet. According to the speakers, young internet users tend to get themselves exposed to targeted advertising. These advertisements were said to be taking personal information from teenagers with the use of cookies, beacons, tracking pixels, persistent identifiers, and possibly other means that we may or may not know about. Although there are potentially good and bad arguments for and against having an age requirement, the audience was still taught to take caution and to avoid being careless when browsing the internet.
The speakers were able to convey the information in a clear and appealing manner. Some of the participants even commented that the speakers did a brilliant job at illustrating the topics. The young audience were also asked questions based on every topic, which they were able to answer with ease. It signified that a lot of them already had encounters and experiences relating to the topics. And when they were asked about their experiences at the end of the event, it was confirmed that they did encounter them. Some said that they had experiences with cyberbullying and some with having social media addiction. One of the young respondents even mentioned that she had suffered anxiety attacks when communicating with others due to something she experienced online.
