The Definition of 21st Century Literacies

     This graphic was created with a Web 2.0 tool I am learning at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation this week.  The tool is called "Tagul" for my teacher friends....it is really neat and much more useful than "Wordle" so I hope you will try it!

     More important than the tool is the review of the fact that the skill set needed to be successful in this century is changing.  The text was taken from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) who have published the definition of the "new literacy".  Included in that definition is the following:

• 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

“…..forest for the trees.”

My grandparents and parents used the old adage “….can’t see the forest for the trees…”  quite regularly.  As someone who has recently retired from education, I am coming to realize that when you are in the public education system, you definitely cannot “…see the forest for the trees”!  So often “the system”, behemoth that it is, prevents that from happening.  For example, I know how much sense it makes in our 21^st century world to eliminate textbooks, a huge expense  for irrelevant material.  But how many times did I go through the adoption process and allocate precious resources toward textbooks?  Many, many times without thought to what we could have been doing with all those dollars to upgrade the technology our kids need to thrive in the global society. 

            Did you know that South Korean officials recently announced that students would not use textbooks after 2014?  Resources will be allocated to electronic tablets and e-learning systems.  They are seeing through “the trees” and realizing that this will contribute toward narrowing the achievement gap between the rich and poor and make learning more fun and effective.  It will take that leap of thinking on the part of “the system” to make it happen!!  It needs to happen in our country soon!  We just need to cut through the bureaucracy of textbook purchasing and see the bigger picture of the 21^st century!!