Changes in the nature of communication have transformed the way children interact inside and outside school. Web 2.0 applications, technologies and digital texts have promoted social interaction through new forms of literacy. These changes in social communication have also transformed the role of teachers about literacies inside and outside school. However, studies based on the use of mobile phones and other technologies warn about differences regarding formal and informal learning models. Digital literacies lead us to think about the education which is being carried out in 21st-century classrooms, where the social and interactive nature of the internet has created new forms of learning. Digital literacies have created new opportunities for reading and writing multimodal texts in social spaces. However, the development of digital literacies inside schools has not taken into account much of their communicative sense, focusing exclusively on aspects related to information technologies. Previous research has revealed that a large part of literacy learning about digital competence has been developed outside school through new, hybrid discourse genres. Social and situated uses of digital literacies have transformed the learning style of students into a non-formal or informal one, creating a new setting in which a school does not have full control of the literacy processes developed in society. State of the art about digital literacy invite us to make research questions in this area: In what spaces do students develop their digital literacy? What digital literacy events and practices are developed in and out of schools? In what extent individual and contextual factors could explain digital literacies in and out of schools? Several studies carried out in Spanish students contribute to help shed light on these issues. The most recent has been developed following a sequential mixed method design (QUANqual) to examine digital literacy practices. The data for QUANT Component were collected in 20 public and state funding schools of the province of Seville (Andalusia, Spain). The sample consisted of 791 children (6-12-year-old), their families and teachers. The data for the qual Component was collected in three of the 20 centres. In the QUANT Component, three self-report questionnaires were administered, one for each type of participant. In the qual Component, interviews, observations, photographs, mapping and video recordings were made. The integration of the QUANT-qual data analysis was guided by the research questions, and it was conducted by crossing the causal inferences found or excluded in both kinds of analysis.

Gillen, J. & Kucirkova, N. (2018). Percolating spaces: creative ways of using digital technologies to connect young children’s school and home lives. British Journal of Educational Technology, 49(5), 834-846. http://dx.doi: 10.1111/bjet.12666. Guzmán-Simón, F., García-Jiménez, E. & López-Cobo, I. (2017). Undergraduate students’ perspectives on digital competence and academic literacy in a Spanish University. Computers in Human Behaviour, 74, 196-204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.04.040 0747-5632