Informatics is about the interface between information, systems and people. Nurses both use and generate information and need to know how to optimize both the generation and use of that information. The scope of informatics is wide and does not refer to any particular type of information, mode of storage or retrieval or to the people who use it. Health informatics and nursing informatics may appear to be narrower; however, there is no limit to the types of information that nurses may use or – within the bounds of clinical confidentiality – who may make use of the information that nurses generate. Nursing students need to be aware of the field of informatics; however, there is no clear definition of what they should learn or what competencies they must have. Informal enquiries elicit that the teaching of nursing informatics ranges from awareness of telehealth to the preparation of patient information booklets, with a range of possibilities in between. Clearly, in the digital are, computer literacy is crucial to exploiting informatics efficiently and those responsible for teaching informatics must be aware of how digitally literate our students are and that, for example, where teachers may turn to online databases for crystallized information, our students are living and working in the era of Web 2.0 where information is fluid and being continually created. Therefore, with the above background, I will explore how students use social media, some of the literature on nursing informatics and some useful ways of presenting data. The concepts of ‘big data’ and common data elements will also be addressed.