Following the lead of David Warlick and a discussion prompted by Will Richardson: Can we organize a set of skills that students need in order to inherit the future?

From Will at Weblogg-ed.com

Our kids’ futures will require them to be:

• Networked–They’ll need an “outboard brain.”
• More collaborative–They are going to need to work closely with people to co-create information.
• More globally aware–Those collaborators may be anywhere in the world.
• Less dependent on paper–Right now, we are still paper training our kids.
• More active–In just about every sense of the word. Physically. Socially. Politically.
• Fluent in creating and consuming hypertext–Basic reading and writing skills will not suffice.
• More connected–To their communities, to their environments, to the world.
• Editors of information–Something we should have been teaching them all along but is even more important now.

From Sylvia Martinez:

"The current curriculum is information-centric because we still believe that if students just learn a basic set of facts, it will be good for them and society in general. If we simply replace paper textbooks and tests for online, hypertextual, multimedia versions, we have nothing to celebrate. We’ve simply replaced the delivery and presentation mechanisms."


From Greg Cruey (guest blogger at Dangerously Irrelevant)

"The 21st Century Learning Initiative has more to do with applying a Constructivist approach to learning to the pedagogy of the classroom than it has to do with technology. If I had to describe the 21st Century Learning Initiative, I would phrase it something like this: It is the conceptual space where modern brain research, Constructivist learning theory, school reform, and the demands of the 21st Century workplace come together."

From Darren Draper, in an effort to motivate teachers to more effectively use technology in their teaching; a video titled "Pay Attention." Since most of today's students can appropriately be labeled as "Digital Learners", why do so many teachers refuse to enter the digital age with their teaching practices?Since most of today's students can appropriately be labeled as "Digital Learners", why do so many teachers refuse to enter the digital age with their teaching practices?


From Dr. Michael Wesch and Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University, "A Vision of Students Today," showing the characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.


From Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod,"Did You Know 2.0," a video which originally started out as a PowerPoint presentation for a faculty meeting in August 2006 at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, United States. The presentation "went viral" on the Web in February 2007 and, as of June 2007, had been seen by at least 5 million online viewers. Today the old and new versions of the online presentation have been seen by at least 11 million people, not including the countless others who have seen it at conferences, workshops, training institutes, and other venues.


From Sir Ken Robinson, "Do Schools Kill Creativity" ;an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. Sir Ken Robinson is author of "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative," and a leading expert on innovation in education and business. (Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA.) Check out more TEDTalks.


Regardless of the curriculum content, and beginning with the concept of the Read/Write Web as subheadings, what do students really need to know?

From NTSE: 21st Century Literacy Skills

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology

• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and

cross-culturally

• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of

purposes

• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous

information

• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts

• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

From Curriculum 2.0 New Literacy Wiki



Information Literacy

• searching, finding and validating information
  

Web 2.0 Reading Skills

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Web 2.0 Writing Skills

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Networking Skills

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Tools Every Student Should Be Able to Use

• Wiki
• Blog
• Google Documents