Learnics provides an excellent opportunity to follow Ohio’s Library Guidelines for Learners with your middle and high school students. Through intentional online research provided by the Learnics platform, students can foster the skills needed to become responsible digital citizens in an increasingly digital world. This allows students to not only practice their digital literacy, but also their information literacy skills as they evaluate information and sources throughout their academic journeys.
The 2021 Ohio Library Guidelines for Learners were developed by a wide range of education stakeholders to provide library media specialists with outcomes for K-12 21st century learners. The strands listed within the guidelines include Digital Literacy, Foundations for Lifelong Learning and Literacy, Information Literacy, and Media Literacy.
“These strands provide four lenses through which kindergarten through grade 12 learners consider and engage with technology and multiple literacies. Together, these strands instill in learners a broad, rich understanding of all types of literacies and the effective use and role of these literacies in their world to ensure they are well positioned to become literate and successful citizens.” (p.4)
Use the information below to kickstart your approach to the Ohio Library Guidelines for Learners using the Learnics platform with your middle and high school students.
Learnics allows students to develop their digital literacy skills, satisfying this strand by having students take an intentional approach to “apply research skills to produce digital artifacts and attribute credit” (6-8) and “apply advanced research strategies, searches, synthesis and source evaluation to produce digital artifacts and online content” (9-12). The Learnics Bibliography feature specifically targets this strand with automatically generating a list of sources for students to review for citing their sources.
Visualizations and data produced by Learnics assignments allows students to self-reflect on their research approach and adjust where needed to satisfy their research objectives. The data output students receive as they continue to log their online behavior during a Learnics-enabled assignment allows them to “apply search strategies to narrow or broaden a search” (6-8) and “conduct extended research projects using a research process model” (9-12).
The Learnics platform allows teachers to view their students' online behavior during a research assignment and facilitate a discussion with their students on research skills, sparking conversations on source evaluation, time spent on assignments, and research approaches. By using Learnics and discussing the data output, students are able to “explore and navigate a variety of new media sources with guidance” (6-8) and “understand and access media ethically and safely for personal and academic use” (9-12). While the initial output of Learnics data is valuable to both students and teachers, the steps taken afterward about the validity of sources is imperative to developing media literacy skills. Check out this past blog post to explore ways to take the data a step further with your students.
Interested in getting started with Learnics? Visit our Getting Started resources to begin your Learnics experience, or set up a demo with one of our team members using Google Calendar.
