Great digital literacy skills ideas for your school library

School libraries play an important role in equipping students with the digital literacy skills they need to effectively navigate the sea of information available online. However, when digital natives feel like they are already masters of the online search, how can teacher librarians tailor the curriculum to engage their students and achieve a positive outcome that extends beyond theoretical research? And with generative AI now woven into how students search, write, and learn, digital literacy increasingly means AI literacy too. We've pulled together some ideas from around the world for you to draw on in your school library, as well as providing ideas about how Oliver v5 and LearnPath can support digital literacy in your school.

Digital literacy skills in school libraries

Health literacy skills

For adolescents, the Internet has become a primary source of answers to the health questions they feel embarrassed or scared to talk to their peers about. However, the misinformation on offer through Dr Google can contribute to dangerous student health outcomes.

In Assessing the Digital Health Literacy Skills of Tween Participants in a School-Library-Based After-School Program, the researchers developed a Digital Healthy Literacy Assessment Tool which uncovered that specific digital health literacy skills are needed to ensure students have the necessary skills to successfully find, assess, manage, and make use of health information online.
Evaluating Internet Health Information: A Tutorial from the National Library of Medicine

Helpful resources:

Online health information - what can you trust?

How to develop health literacy in the classroom

 

Political literacy skills

In the age of fake news and alternative facts, School libraries, political information and information literacy provision: findings from a Scottish study, looks at the role that school libraries can take in providing access to political information and skills on how to navigate the plethora of information generated by the 24 hour news cycle.

Helpful Resources:

Fact checking and fake news lesson plans – The ultimate teacher guide

How to Spot Fake News - FactCheck.org

Safe Internet Use

A 2016 study explored where people got their advice about online security, and how useful it actually was. Survey respondents who said they received their advice from teachers or librarians reported the lowest frequency of negative online experiences, reinforcing the importance of digital literacy skills programs in school libraries.

Helpful Resources:

Office of the Children’s eSafety Commissioner - Classroom Resources

StaySafeOnline.org

The National Library of New Zealand has published information on how school libraries can support students’ digital literacy. Core to their message is that school libraries need to provide easily accessible, quality, curated digital resources. They suggest that school’s should aim to provide 24/7 access to digital resources and that the integrated library system (such as Oliver v5), library blog or website, school learning management system, or curated content collections are ideal options.

AI literacy skills

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini are now part of everyday student life, which makes AI literacy a natural extension of the digital literacy work school libraries already do. Students don't just need to know how to use these tools; they need to understand how AI generates its answers, why it sometimes invents convincing but false information ("hallucinations"), and how to verify what it tells them. As trusted, neutral spaces focused on information quality, school libraries are ideally placed to lead this conversation.

A practical starting point is to fold AI into the source-evaluation skills you're already teaching. The SIFT method (Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace claims to their original context), developed by digital literacy researcher Mike Caulfield, works just as well for checking an AI-generated answer as it does for a news article — students "find better coverage" by confirming the AI's claims against reliable sources, and "trace claims" back to a real, citable origin.

A few easy activities to try in the library:

• Fact-check the chatbot. Ask students to pose a research question to a generative AI tool, then verify each claim and citation it produces using library databases and trusted sources. Many will discover invented references or subtly wrong "facts" — a memorable lesson in why human verification matters.
• Spot the AI. Compare a human-written passage with an AI-generated one and discuss the tells: vague generalisations, confident-but-unsourced claims, and a lack of genuine perspective. Extend the same critical eye to AI-generated images, audio, and video, and the rise of deepfakes.
• Prompt and critique. Have students refine a prompt several times and reflect on how the wording changes the output, building awareness that AI responses are shaped by inputs, training data, and bias rather than being objective truth.

Helpful resources:

• Common Sense Education – AI Literacy Lessons for Grades 6–12 (free, grab-and-go lessons of 20 minutes or less)
• Common Sense Education – Navigating AI in Schools
• UNESCO AI Competency Framework for Students (an international reference for building AI understanding into the curriculum)
• The SIFT Method – a four-move approach to evaluating any source, including AI output

How Oliver v5 and LearnPath can help support digital literacy

LearnPath allows school libraries to:

• Organise, publish and share curated educational resources
• Immediately access an extensive library of readymade content pages produced by experienced teacher librarians
• Ensure resource quality and safe browsing
• Provide clear learning paths and research frameworks
• Create high-quality, curriculum-based subject guides to provide students with a springboard into their studies, and help address the challenge of information overload, including guides that model how to verify AI-generated information against trusted sources

Oliver v5 allows school libraries to:

 

• Build and publish curated reading lists that feature both physical and electronic resources
• Access eBooks and audiobooks from the OverDrive and Wheelers collections directly from the Oliver v5 search interface
• Catalogue digital content including videos, websites, audio. School libraries that subscribe to SCIS can also access thousands of catalogue records for digital content including educational websites, apps and eBooks
• Integrate with educational content providers such as ClickView to embed trusted educational digital content directly within the library catalogue
• Provide 24/7 access from anywhere, anytime. As no software downloads are required, Oliver works is compatible with all computer systems, tablets and mobile devices
• Use the integrated Federated Search / Search Other Sources features to discover resources from multiple sources simultaneously (including paid subscription databases and the local catalogue) in real time, direct from the Oliver v5 search screen
• Encourage student progression through reading levels via the display of Accelerated Reader quiz information
• Share book ratings and reviews within the school community

By steering students toward this kind of curated, quality-assured content, both tools give them a reliable benchmark to check AI-generated answers against — reinforcing AI literacy in the everyday flow of research.

Excited to learn more about Oliver v5 and LearnPath? Visit the following resources

• A new curriculum can be exciting, but overwhelming! We’ve added senior content in the LearnPath Community Content Hub (LCCH) to support you as you resource the curriculum. Here’s a snapshot of some available guides.

• In this video case study (5:40min), Jim Gallagher discusses his success using LearnPath guides as a teaching tool, and a number of other benefits of introducing LearnPath at his school.

• Did you know that Oliver isn’t just a Library Management System? You can use Oliver to keep track of resources throughout your entire school. Read this blog post to learn more.

• This blog post covers using Oliver to keep track of your school archival information.

Editor’s note: this post was originally published in May 2017 and was updated for freshness, relevance and accuracy in March 2026.