Week Three

With today's knowledge age the digital tools our net generation students have access to will give them power to amplify their ability to think, learn, communicate, collaborate and create. With that power come the need to learn appropriate skills. Even when students are more fluent in the use of technology, they will always need teachers and parents guidance.
Our ever increasing age of technology forces us all to adapt to the new ways of communicating, learning, working and living. Technology helps develop independence as it is always available 24/7 but we must become self directed. Cross culture collaboration is possible giving students insight into how we are alike and yet different.
Technology allows us to divide work up among team members. Individuals can take projects utilizing their strengths to produce a creative outcome from the collaboration.
Our job is going to be a challenge to teach all students these 21st century skills along with the core subject areas to produce a well rounded individual.
I liked the quote, "Diversity is the one thing we all have in common". Isn't it great that we can glean knowledge from everyone elses strengths!

What Is Century 21st Learning?

One of the key roles roles for education is to prepare future workers to deal with the challenges of time. The kind of work that needs to be done by anyone who has the expertise, a cell phone, laptop, and internet connection, but we need an education system that produces them. Education becomes a key role in the 21st century. Students graduating from secondary schools, technical colleges and universities are lacking in the basic skills. The 21st century skills gap is costing a business a great deal of money because these people are not prepared. Achieving goals for our time is increasing in powerful technologies we have for communicating, collaborating and learning. To be a productive contributor you need to contribute to work and society, fulfill civic responsibility and carry forward traditions and values. Global forces are coming together to help transform learning to meet the demands of our time and we need to get prepared and get on board.

Section 2 Summary

There are four dominating forces coming together, leading us toward different ways of learning for the 21st centruy: knowledge work, thinking tools, digital lifestyles, and learning research. Knowledge work in the 21st century demands well trained workers that use brainpower and digital tools to accomplish their daily work: digital tools such as cell phones, web conferencing, and databases just to name a few. Technology and digital devices and services are the thinking tools. The rate at which these technoligical thinking tools are growing is astounding. People age 11-31 are growing up in a digital lifestyle. Today, there are many portable devices that people can retrieve communication on: ipod, cell phone, PDA, etc. Learning research is reasearch about how people in the 21st century learn. They learn best through real life examples, internal motivation, personalized learning, and social learning: technology can meet all of these areas of learning. The quote I found interesting is on p. 25: "Computer microchips continue to double their processing speed every eighteen months. The average cell phone has more processing power than all the computers used to plan and run the early space missions." These 2 facts demonstrate that technology is growing at an astounding rate, and as educators, we need to prepare our future generation for that.