21st Century Skills as Transformation in K-12 Schools–Ken Kay

Why is the world different?

1. We need our students to become effective 21st Century Citizens�much more complicated. California ballot.

2. The US is falling behind�very conscious about sports, why don’t we have the same awareness of where our students are in the global education�We’re in the middle on content, we’re at the bottom when dealing with analytical thinking and problem solving.

3. The magnitude of our competition is changing�20 years ago when we had a major challenge from Japan we did something about it�business schools weren’t teaching state of the art business strategies�just in time production, TQM�today same thing, not focused on those needs�20 years ago we transformed business schools�those students are pretty much up to speed�can’t say that about people coming out of colleges of education�the threat from Japan, however, was 1/20 that of what we face today from China and India�kids are leaving without the “flat skills”

4. The nature of work is changing�How many of our grandparents had only one or two jobs in their lifetimes�70-80%…how many jobs will young people have by the time they are 38? 10.2�the point is that the model of mastering subject, master content�the skill set we need now is not the mastery of one set of facts it’s the ability to adapatable and flexible, to move in and out of content�need to evolve into a new model of education.

What is the framework for 21st Century skills?

20th Century�core subjects over assessment. 21st Century�life skills, 21st Century content, core subjects, learning and thinking skills, ICTliteracy over 21st century assessment. ICT literacy says that the reason we need technology is to accomplish learning and thinking skills. The role of technology is do you know how to use the tech to accomplish critical thinking. 21st Century content is about those subjects that are underemphasized�global awareness, financial literacy, civic engagement, health and wellness skills. Life skills�need self directed learners. HERE ARE THE Critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and innovation skills, communication and information skills, collaboration, contextual learning, information and media literacy�these are the attributes our young people have to have�kids that know this will succeed. Goal of technology is to accomplish those skills. How does their knowledge of technology link to those skill sets today. Life skills, leadership, ethics, accountabiluty, adaptability, personal productivity, personal responsibility, people skills, self direction, social responsibility. Content: Global awareness, financial, civic responsibility, health and wellness.

Four Critical Issues

1. Accountability and metrics are here to stay�in the 21st Century, how can we only have a metric for content when critical thinking is crucial.

2. Assessment–Can you imagine a 21st computer company that is only measuring it sales of 1960s computers. We need to measure metrics of innovative learning. Our system tells kids the same piece of information a 100 times and then tests to see if the kid can tell it back the 101st time. But can our kids see something for the first time and have the skills to analyze it and make sense of it. Today’s assessments are a conspiracy of convenience–Paul Resta, U of Texas. 21stcenturyskills.org

3. High School Reform–Results that matter report being released tomorrow. New definition of rigor that includes 21st Century Skills. 21st Century skills should become the design spaces for high school reform.

4. Professional Development–can’t expect our current teachers to know how to teach critical thinking and problem solving without pd.

Every student must be a critical thinker, problem solver, innovator, effective communicator, effective collaborator, self-directed learner, information and media literate, globally aware, civically engaged, financially and economically literate. These should become the design specs for 21st Century education.

Technorati Tags: FETC2006, Literacy

From today’s New York Times:

“The scale of N.C.L.B. testing requirements, competitive pressures in the testing industry, a shortage of testing experts, insufficient state resources, tight regulatory deadlines and a lack of meaningful oversight of the sprawling N.C.L.B. testing enterprise are undermining N.C.L.B.’s pursuit of higher academic standards,” he writes. And that is from a man who supports the federal law.

Sounds encouraging, huh?

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So it just so happens that right up the road from me at Rutgers University is a professor looking to do some research into the effects of blogs, wikis, et. al. Here’s the class description Dr. Erica Bohling is offering this summer:

What literacy skills do teachers and students need in order to succeed in today�s information-rich, digital society? What are some effective instructional tools and models for integrating technology into the middle school and high school curriculum? How can teachers in all content areas support students� information literacy and research skills? The purpose of this course is to explore the kinds of literacies that are needed to succeed in today�s Digital Age society and to investigate the ways in which such literacies can enhance teaching and learning. This 3-credit, graduate level course emphasizes strategies and skills that support an inquiry-based approach to learning where students are able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use information across a range of media. Participants will be introduced to technologies such as Blogs, Wikis, and RSS feeds and will explore the role of new technologies in education.

Sounds like we could all have fun in that class. Well, me at least.

(Full disclosure: Dr. Bohling was involved in the feedback stages of my book.)

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So if this isn’t a perfect example of why teachers need to explore these technologies, I don’t know what is. Chris Kenniburg and Jamie Soltis at Long Elementary in Dearborn, MI have combined text, art and audio to create an “ongoing digital storytelling podcast.”

The idea behind the project is to get every grade level at an elementary school to add a new episode (Chapter in the Story) to the podcast by expanding on the previous story submission. The students write and illustrate the next chapter. They then turn to the technology to digitally express themselves creating voiceovers, titles, and animations. These elements are then exported as a �podcast ready� video file to be added to the story. This new �digital book� concept is catching on and the next grade level has begun creating the next chapter in the story. At the end of the year we plan on combining all the video files to create a completed story.

You have got to look at these. Learn from these. Amazingly good work from the kids and the teachers. (Check out the way the pages look…awesome!) They’re just starting, but you can just already tell the type of work these kids are doing. They are writing, planning, collaborating, creating, publishing…all for a real, valuable purpose. To teach what they know and share it with an interested audience. I think if this community started giving out “Best Practice Awards” (hey…there’s an idea…) this would definitely get one.

This is another example of why it’s feeling like momentum is building here. I can only imagine what teachers and kids will do, given the chance…
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Here’s an admission…I’m an RSS fraud. Hypocrite, if you must. And I apologize.

Yesterday, in three straight presentations about the wonders and potential of RSS to rock our eduworlds, I kept getting more and more embarrased at the fact that when I showed my Bloglines account, which has ballooned up to 197 feeds, it was obvious that while I might be subscribed, I’m not keeping up with my reading. In fact, if you totalled up the number of unread messages in my list, it’s a very audience appealing 3739. If that doesn’t motivate some people to dive right in, I don’t know what will.

Now understand that 2,347 of those are from Wes Freyer, the most prolific edublogger in the universe. (Really it’s “only” 57.) And the problem is that I hestitate to click the Wes link because I know it’s gonna take me at least an hour to read through all of the good stuff he’s blogging about. (Slow down, Wes. Please. I’m begging.)

This is why I had to quit my job…

Anyway, I made the people in attendance yesterday swear that they would take a time out if they ever got up to 20 feeds in their aggregators. Hopefully that will keep them from feeling like a total RSS failure if they should “get behind” in their reading.

The most interesting thing about yesterday’s MassCue Technology Leadership Symposium at least to me, was that two educators came up to me at different times of the day and said the same thing almost verbatim:

I have never seen a technology that has turned my students on more than podcasting.

Seriously…almost verbatim, and kind of out of the blue since I was talking about RSS (though I was hawking my book…I have no shame.) And to both of them I asked why they thought that was. The answer was basically the ease of it, the audience, the ability to hear themselves piping through the speakers wherever they were. And these teachers were downright giddy with the excitement of it all. Very cool.

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t “get” podcasting at first, and to be honest, I’m not sure I do still. But that doesn’t much matter, does it? Kids get it, especially elementary kids. And even though it may not be the best tool for conversation (though a blog built around a podcast can help in that) it is a great tool for teaching writing, among other things. That’s the other thing I hear a lot. These kids are really motivated to write and think and prepare these podcasts because they know they are going to be published, that others will hear them. And it’s different strokes with these tools, isn’t it? You don’t like text (like I do) try audio, and if that doesn’t engage you, try video or screencasting or whatever. And there is more to come, don’t forget. We’re only just starting.

Isn’t it cool, however, that in some small measure, the little kids are leading the way???

One of the other pre-conference conversations last night was about the Tablet PC. One of the schools here got a grant to put Tablets into 20 teachers’ hands and the result has been, not surprisingly, very favorable. The responses sounded a lot like those of the teachers at my school who have talked about how the new classroom model has changed not only the way they teach but the way they feel about teaching. Very cool.

One thing I’ve started to do more and more with my tablet is to take interesting blog posts or articles found on the Web, “print” them into OneNote, the most awesome notebook program for the Tablet, and then mark them up as I read with the pen. In doing so, I’m creating a whole searchable library of interesting content, I’m also creating a whole searchable library of my handwritten notes. So now what I can do is not only add tags to a certain article, I can tag pieces of an article for retreival later. (See this example snippet of David Warlick’s latest post…I simply add the number 1 at the end of the tag to separate if from words in the text.) That is very, very cool, I think, and something that I wish I could do on the Web in general. Imagine if you could pick out half a dozen sections out of one piece of content and tag each one individually. That would really separate out relevant content and make synthesis of it all later so much easier.

The problem is that I feel like I’m doing double duty now, creating my own library in OneNote, yet still saving bookmarks in del.icio.us. I’m finding the former more powerful, but the latter more social, obviously. Not going to stop sharing, but I have to say the difference between the two is pretty striking.

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I’m in Worcester, MA today at a MassCue conference talking about RSS in education, getting ready to listen to Jamie McKenzie’s keynote. Last night I had the chance to chat with a couple of technology integrators from the area, and the talk was all about blogs, podcasts, Moodle and the like. What a difference from just a few short months ago. The best part is that there seems to be a real desire on the part of teachers to learn about the ways in which the tools can be used to enhance what they do in the classroom. Again, maybe I’m looking for it, but I could feel more of that noticeable shift in the conversations…

So it seems the “why” conversation is spreading. I wish I’d seen Nancy McKeand’s post earlier, but as has been the case of late, I’m way behind on my reading and feeling the familiar nose above water feeling. She’s doing a workshop today and asked readers of her blog to chime in with why we use blogs in our classrooms. The answers (11 at this moment) make me feel pretty positive of where we’re at with this. They’re all about conversations and connections, about thinking and learning. And I was struck by how much of what the commenters highlighted was about reading which, as I’ve said many times before, is where blogging must start. That has me especially optimistic.

I’m getting the sense that we are, at last, at a turning point. David Warlick is talking about telling new stories. This morning, I must have spent an hour just wading through a whole bunch of edublogs that I never knew existed, and they all linked to others which linked to others. (BTW, there are a bunch of Australian edublogs that absolutely blew my mind…here’s a thread from just one of them.) In my presentations, people know what blogs are, and what they are really seeking now is pedagogy, not training. It feels like, finally, this is no longer a technology as it is another way to connect and communicate. It’s feeling like in some places, at least, blog thinking is becoming embedded.

Now I know there is still a great deal of blog angst out there. All that MySpace stuff. All the just a new way of doing old stuff, stuff. Heck, I have to admit that when I read that Dave Winer, who is about as close to Adam in the blog world as you’ll find, has given notice that he will soon give up blogging, I was a bit taken aback. Could I give up blogging? Could I just walk away, cold turkey? (This is, after all, some sort of addiction, let’s face it.) I’ve become so intertwined in this space that it’s hard to imagine. And to be clear, even though I have been fortunate to build a comparatively sizeable audience for my ideas through the blog, I still feel like this is my space (two words) to do my thinking and supposing and, ultimately, learning. This process of reading, thinking, writing is how I learn. Sometimes it’s reading, talking, thinking, writing, but it’s almost always learning. I can’t see that stopping at this point.

So maybe it is time to reinvent this conversation. Maybe we’re moving out of the how to and into the why. And when we get down that road a stretch, we’ll get back to the how again, only this time with an eye on best practice teaching and learning. Then it should get really, really fun.

From the “Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.” comes this link to an excerpt from my book in Technology and Learning Magazine. I have to say, while the concept that I actually produced this thing is finally starting to sink in, it still feels pretty strange to actually see my name on a book.

And btw, if you have gotten a chance to read it, I’d love to know what you think. You can add some comments to my wiki if you feel so moved. The password is rww.
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Great articulation by Kevin Clark of a really important shift in thinking that we have to get to:

Politicians often rationalize technology initiatives by saying “We’re educating our students for the future, they need to know how to use technology for their future professions.” It’s not the technology that they need to know how to use. They can use it already…a lot better than your local representative. The connections and community-building that can occur within student blogs is what they need to know how to do.

This is similar to the interesting discussion from a post a few days about about mis-understanding blogs. It’s getting to be less and less about the tool and more and more about the opportunities the tools create, the “why”, not the “how.” And the “why we should use any of these tools” question is all about their capacity to build connections and community. It’s one thing to master the skills to create whatever artifact you want: PowerPoint presentation, claymation sequence, screencast, blog post…whatever. But it’s another thing entirely to know how to take that creation and use it to connect to people, ideally to other learners, and start conversations with them about the value and meaning of whatever it is we create. That’s the shift. Creation in the relative vacuum of the classroom can no longer be the final goal. It’s publishing. It’s teaching through that creation, connecting through that creation that we should be striving for.

So next week I’m actually just attending a conference (what a concept) when I head down to FETC with a colleague. There are a few featured speakers who I’m looking forward to seeing for the first time, and some of the sessions look pretty interesting as well. (I defintely want to see David and take in some of the other Read/Write Web sessions, though I have to say, the pickings seem awfully slim.)

So I’m just wondering if there would be any interest in a edblogger meetup on Thursday night? Anyone going? Anyone interested???

I had the great pleasure of spending a couple of hours with about 40 Alabama teachers yesterday during an Elluminate online conference session that I gave on Blogs in the Classroom. Even better, Darren Kuropatwa came in for a guest appearance and talked a bit about his experiences. I have to say that despite finding Elluminate to be somewhat chaotic what with hands going up and chat rooms and all sorts of functionality, it’s a great way of reaching out to people where they are, bringing them together in a very supportive and easy environment, and having some great conversation. It’s just another one of those tools that gives me a whole bunch of optimism for the uses of technology in our classrooms and a great example of how quickly things are changing. Thanks to Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, John Norton, and Cathy Gassenheimer with the Alabama Best Practice Center for inviting me.

So I’m going to take a moment to once again get defensive about blogs, and specifically blogging. Hopefully it won’t be offensive.

David Warlick pointed to a series of video interviews with ed tech experts at the recent CUE conference in California, and I happened to check out the one on “Ed Tech Trends” with David Thornburg, Hall Davidson and Peter H. Reynolds. First, let me say it’s a great discussion of what’s happening in the world of edtech, and I’m happy to report that blogs and wikis are at the forefront of the discussion. Go and watch it if you get a chance (a long with the other featuring Steve Dembo and David Warlick.) That’s the good news.

The bad news is that to some extent, I think the conversation misses the point. What got me going was when Hall Davidson said “Blogs are online journals when done right” and then added that it’s “not a format that going to pull anything else out of you” compared to more traditional tools. David Thornburg had an equally lukewarm assessment, and while Peter Reynolds I think got it more than the rest, he didn’t get the chance to articulate it very well. (He also said that he considered MySpace a blogging site.)

Ok, I know. Let it go. The thing that gets me is that none of these three are bloggers of any consistency, at least that I can find. Hall does blog at the Discovery Educator Network, but not very often. And I guess I just wish they wouldn’t opine about the usefulness of technologies that they don’t fully understand. Blogs are much more than online journals when done right. They offer much more than the traditional tools in terms of giving voice, building community, enhancing learning not just from a writing standpoint.

To be fair, all three of these guys grasp what’s happening with Web technologies, and much of what they have to say is right on and, frankly, very optimistic and energizing. They really get the sense of community that these tools can create, and they understand the powerful connections that they can bring about. In fact, the best excerpt from the whole thing was when Peter said that from a teaching standpoint, your colleagues are no longer just the people down the hall. They are teachers in Australia and journalists in Russia and scientists in India. What a very cool, expansive way to start thinking about teaching.

Ok, I feel better now. Back to more fruitful blogging…