Empowering Digital Natives: InstaClone – a Novel Approach to Data Literacy Education in the Age of Social Media

Social media has become an integral part of young people’s lives, and despite being associated as digital natives, they lack essential skills in terms of reflective usage of data, thus underscoring the potential of computing education to empower their data literacy. To this end, this paper presents [AnonTool], an innovative educational tool for classroom proposes that allows students to engage with a social media platform within a secure learning environment. With the appearance and functionality resembling Instagram, [AnonTool] offers a lifelike learning environment in which students generate data that is then processed and visualized in integrated data analytics dashboards, facilitating individual data literacy development. A case study with year 9 and year 10 students in the K-12 computer science classroom demonstrates that [AnonTool] convincingly emulates the real platform, and students benefit from using the tool by developing a deeper understanding of the data collected by social media platforms and the underlying algorithms.     «

Social media has become an integral part of young people’s lives, and despite being associated as digital natives, they lack essential skills in terms of reflective usage of data, thus underscoring the potential of computing education to empower their data literacy. To this end, this paper presents [AnonTool], an innovative educational tool for classroom proposes that allows students to engage with a social media platform within a secure learning environment. With the appearance and functionalit...     »