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Technology has been with us since I've been a teacher. I started my career succumbing to the alluring aroma of the Gestetner (Ditto/Banda/spirit duplicator) machine and its purple stained sheet. Then the photocopier arrived and we didn't think it could get any better than making copies of a page for every child. The reality is that many teachers still rely heavily on the immediacy and simplicity of the photocopied black line master provided by someone else. It is far less confusing that all that technical mum jumbo introduced with the computer in the 90s.

This Digital Literacy Toolkit began with the premise that multimedia authoring, which is happening with the extensive use of PowerPoint in classrooms, must be taught as a skill, just as traditional text-based writing is taught. While teachers and students have become familiar with the technical skills required to use images in multimedia productions, they lack a critical language to determine whether an image or a sound is used appropriately.

Graphing 2.0 Information graphics give us new ways to understand and think about information. They include a huge category of visuals that are capable of communicating in diverse ways through charts, maps, diagrams, data visualizations and technical, instructional and scientific explanations. It seems that infographics become more valuable as our need to understand a complex world increases.