Overview
The Digital Literacy Framework Hub is your one-stop location for digital literacy resources available to teachers, families and students to support learning.
Digital Literacy Framework
This framework builds on New Brunswick’s 2022 Digital Literacy Framework. The six components remain the same. This version weaves AI thinking throughout, rather than treating it as a separate topic. It does not add new expectations. It supports and clarifies work already happening in classrooms.
To explore the complete Digital Literacy Framework in depth, click here.
For a one-page, at a glance overview, click here.
For grade-band continuums of the digital literacy framework, click here.
For questions about the Digital Literacy Framework, email [email protected].
What is Digital Literacy?
Digital literacy is the ability to think critically, act ethically, and take part in a world shaped by digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI).
It is not about keeping up with the latest apps or platforms. It is about developing judgment – knowing when and how to use technology, when to question it, and when to put it down.
Explore the components of the Digital Literacy Framework
Digital Citizenship
| Students learn to take part in digital spaces with care for others and awareness of their own rights and responsibilities. This means understanding privacy, data, and ethical behaviour online. It also means asking whose voices are present in digital spaces, whose are missing, and what it means to use tools that affect other people – including understanding how AI can shape what we see and who gets heard. |
Digital Health and Wellness
| Students develop the self-awareness and habits to use technology in ways that support their well-being rather than undermine it. This includes managing attention, recognising when a tool is doing the thinking for them, and making conscious choices about how and when to engage. Healthy technology habits are not about avoidance – they are about agency. |
Critical Inquiry and Meaning Making
| Students evaluate information, question sources, and build understanding rather than taking digital outputs at face value. With AI-generated content now common in research, writing, and media, this matters more than ever. Checking and verifying remains a human job – especially when the source is a sophisticated AI tool. |
Creativity, Design, and Problem Solving
| Students use digital tools – including AI – to generate, develop, and refine ideas. The key is authorship: students are the designers, not the tools. AI can support brainstorming and drafting, but the questions, judgments, and choices belong to the student. |
Communication and Collaboration
| Students co‑create knowledge across digital environments. As AI tools shape how we communicate and collaborate – through suggested replies, shared workspaces, summaries, and platforms—students need to consider how these systems influence teamwork and perspective. Effective digital communicators and collaborators understand the tools they use and the relationships they shape. |
Computational Thinking
| Students break down problems, identify patterns, and develop logical approaches to decisions and solutions. Computational thinking is not just for coding; it supports analysing complex situations and working through problems in structured ways, with or without technology. Connecting this thinking to contexts makes it relevant. |