Use technology purposefully to create, organise, store, manipulate and retrieve digital content

Creating digital content has many practical possibilities. These include commonplace tasks such as word-processing, creating pictures using paint packages, working with digital photographs and video (including animations), writing computer programs, and creating online content such as blog posts, forum contributions, wiki entries and social network updates. This creative work is digitised (i.e. converted to numbers) once it’s on the computer.

The sheer quantity of digital information makes the skill of organising digital content more important than ever. In more practical terms, we might think of how to bring together different digital media, how to order a series of paragraphs, how to organise the files in our documents directory, or how to tag photos and posts online.

Storing digital content is perhaps something we take for granted. Knowing where a file is saved in the directory structure is important. It’s vital to be able to distinguish between the hard disk (or solid state storage) inside the computer itself, the school’s network server, USB disks or memory cards, and online storage via the Internet.

Content is stored digitally. Size is measured in bytes, one byte being the amount of information needed to encode a single character of text.

A kilobyte (kB) is 1000 bytes, 1000 kB is a megabyte (MB), 1000 MB is a gigabyte (GB) and 1000 GB is one terabyte (TB). The list continues beyond that. A short word-processed document might be 25 kB, a digital photo 5 MB, a feature-length, high-definition film 4 GB and the data on a computer hard drive 1 TB.

Manipulating digital content is likely to involve using one or more application programs, such as word-processors, presentation software, or image-, audio- or video-editing packages. The pupil makes changes to the digital content, which might include combining content from multiple sources. The skill here is not just using the software tools, but also knowing how best to change the content for the audience and purpose, and to take into account principles of good design.

Retrieving digital content could be seen as the reverse of storing: the skills of opening and saving documents are similar. Retrieving content requires you to know what you called the file, what file type it is, and where you stored it.

Finding files can be time-consuming, especially when the filing system is not well organised. Computer filing systems have search features to make this easier, but are reliant on the user remembering enough about the file to be able to search for it. The problem of finding a particular file is harder on the web, although the links between web pages help, and these are at the centre of Google’s algorithm for ranking search results.