Digital Smarts - “Picting” May be the New Literacy

"Picting" – the usage of image-based materials - is the new literacy for today's students, assert professors Cathie Norris and Elliot Soloway in a recent blog post. In the post they examine how social media's reliance on images and the amount of time youths spend on social media is changing literacy and that it is something that parents, teachers and even employers need to pay attention to. Students spend much more of their time outside of school using and communicating with pictures than text. Popular social media applications for youth, such as SnapChat and Instagram, are primarily photo-based, so this begs the question: will pictures really come to be worth a thousand words?