21st Century Skills

A great blog and interview is linked below that discusses 21st century skills. I also agree that learning to think, and learning to use technology--as well as we use a telephone--are the best 21st century skills to learn.

21st Century Firefox

Our Virtual Instructor's Academy of Texas is located at http://www.via-tx.org.

The Future for High School Students

In David Warlick's conference, we discussed what the future would be like for students in high school today. Here are some of my predictions:
1. Students will make significant career changes, at least 4-5 times in a lifetime (true today)
2. Technology will become the divide between the "Haves" and the "Have Nots."
3. Districts or public entities will provide wireless access for their constituents as they discover the huge effect that it has on student achievement.
4. We are progressing toward lighter-weight technology applications and wider social networking. So, I predict that we'll have tools at our fingertips--and social webs of access connecting our tools together.

Integrating Technology into the Curriculum

In David Warlick's presentation last week, he said schools need to stop integrating technology into the curriculum, to instead embrace technology as our students have. I agree.

I am sad when I see technology integration training that includes things like, "Fifty-two ways to use Microsoft Word in the Classroom," or other applications like that. Without curriculum focus and alignment, how can a teacher use a list like that?

My daughter's Calculus teacher seems to embrace technology. She has the students text answers to her during class activities. She has a text group for my daughter's class, she sends reminders when they have homework.

Convocation on Public Education

We are currently attending "Education 2021 - Preparing Kids for a Future We Can't Describe" with David Warlick presenting. Wow! We have learned about so many innovative and exciting resources used by other schools and districts. We met in small groups to discuss ways to prepare our students to be successful in their future world. Our group discussed making changes in schools including:

1. Changes in the climate including freeing teachers to be innovative and removing obstacles such as web filtering, sign-in sheets (letting to decide when they leave school--to study and innovate from home), etc.
2. Honoring and celebrating change and innovation.
3. Thinking outside the box--how can we do things differently?
4. Using new, young teachers as agents of change--they are already blogging, wiki-ing, podasting, texting, etc.
5. Provide a website or resource for teachers to advertise project- or problem-based projects to join with groups within school, within district, or anywhere in the world.

Instructional Technology newsletters about Podcasting, Second Life, and other topics are available at http://hcde-texas.org/default.aspx?name=instructtechhome.