June 2008 — 21st-Century Classroom
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Which Side Are You On?
"Digital photography, digital audio recording, and the ability to put it all together-- these are all skills I'd say we're expecting everyone to have," she says. "A lot of what we do also revolves around polling, so an understanding of technologies to facilitate and process that sort of thing is going to be huge."
Like Kay and Glyer, Brands also cites the interdependency of being tech savvy with being a quick thinker. "Being able to think quickly and creatively enough to use technology to present information is something [every company] will be looking for to some degree," she says. "This reality makes technology skills central to better 21st-century skills overall."
A Framework for Success
At the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the future is captured in three letters: ICT-- information, communication, and technology-- a blueprint the organization has drawn up that outlines how schools and school districts can best prepare students to use technology to maximize creativity and innovation, improve critical thinking and problem solving, and get better at both communication and collaboration.
There's no set list of specific technologies that students need to learn, but instead a framework of skills that can be applied to a vast number of them, including proficiency in programming languages, multimedia creation, and Web 2.0 tools, as well as basic familiarity with wireless applications, comfort with databases, and a general understanding of how best to access information available on the internet.
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"ICT literacy focuses on your ability to work with others using technology," says Kay. "It's not just your ability to Google stuff; it's your ability to use other types of media to obtain the information, and your ability to determine if the information you find is actually accurate."
Interestingly, Margaret Honey, senior vice president for strategic initiative and research at Wireless Generation, points out that one of the reasons students need to acquire technology skills is to help them maintain some order over the enormous output of information flowing from these very technologies.
To make her point, Honey cites the example of her 18-yearold son. When the soon-to-be college freshman recently showed Honey his e-mail program, she was stunned to see the volume of messages flooding his inbox, unsorted, and to learn that the boy had not developed strategies for organizing the influx of all that information. While it's clear that her son knows how to usee-mail, she says that that skill is not sufficient in and of itself.
"What he really should be doing is taking advantage of those aspects of his e-mail system that would enable him to categorize and sort and do a much more analytical job of keeping track of the information that's coming his way," Honey says. "This is the whole point with technology skills for the 21st century-- knowing specific technologies means nothing unless you understand how to apply that knowledge to the real world."
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Matt Villano is a freelance writer based in Healdsburg, CA.
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