Wednesday, October 14, 2009

21st Century Skills: What Do They Look Like?

I attended a Webinar last week on this topic and thought I'd share with you a couple of highlights. Brad Flickinger, the presenter, provided real life applications in the classroom tied directly to 21st century skills. A good presentation to view, especially those of us working on development of A'o Kumu, Ke Kumu: 21st Century Technologies and Culture-based Learning.

Brad provided a good summary of 21st century skills for both students and teachers.

  • Students: creativity & innovation, research & information fluency, communication & collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, digital citizenship, technology operations and concepts
  • Teaches: facilitate & inspire student learning and creativity, design & develop digital-age learning experiences & assessments, promote & model digital citizenship & responsibility, engage in professional growth & leadership, model digital-age work & learning
This is something we should definitely look at incorporating into our course development process (maybe in the intro area or minimally a checklist sheet for teachers to incorporate in their electronic portfolio to showcase they have learned these skills?)

One statement that stuck with me and something I totally agree on was when Brad mentioned that the intent for us to focus on 21st century skills is really about students learning skills required of them in the new global economy vs. focusing on learning a specific technology, for example MS Word 2007. Although we would integrate and have students learn MS Word 2007 in the curriculum now, the focus should be on providing them skills to be able to navigate and utilize a word processing software 10,20 years from now, whatever form the technology takes at that time.

He also provided Atomic Learning resources that I felt would be useful for our team to look at. If you haven't checked out Atomic Learning lately, you may want to take a look. There is much more than software tutorials now.

  1. 21st century skills projects from Atomic Learning
    http://movies.atomiclearning.com/k12/21st_cs_tutorials/
  2. Technology integration projects: lesson accelerators from Atomic Learning
    http://movies.atomiclearning.com/k12/21st_cs_tutorials/

Archived presentation: http://www.media.qualitytech.com/client/new_bay/2009_1008/160453/launch.htm

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2 comments:

  1. CassieOctober 14, 2009 at 2:35 PM

    This was very interesting. Your findings also support a recent article in the NEA Today about digital literacy. Karl Fisch, director of technology at Arapahoe High School stated, "Being (digitally) literate also means using critical thinking skills to analyze, critique, and evalute information - essential skills in an information abundant society" (Walker, 2009). Mr. Fisch also has a blog (http://thefisch.blogspot.com), where he expands on his thoughts of the digital world in education and learning.

    One thing I would like to also add is not only are we trying to stimulate students to be self-directed learners who can problem-solve or use their critical thinking skills, but also raise the level of inquiry or questioning to exercise the skills for problem-solving and critical thinking.

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  2. DorothyOctober 14, 2009 at 4:16 PM

    Thanks for sharing your mana'o Cassie. I agree. Besides stimulating students to be self-directed learners, we also need to raise their level of inquiry, which requires more planning when developing curriculum, but should definitely be incorporated. :)

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