Hello!
I had a real eye-opening experience recently that I want to share with you all.
I started taking the Microsoft Partners In Learning (PIL) training in February. There were over 200 of us, from all over the world, participating in the webinars that focused on 21st Century Competencies and how to create quality Professional Development opportunities to relate these ideas to our teachers.
What I found surprising was that many of my colleagues only had a nebulous understanding of these standards and were confused about the difference between teaching competencies and digital literacy.
To see how our consortium schools faired, I conducted a very unscientific, superficial, anecdotal investigation and I found that many teachers had a similar confusion!
Now, for certain, we have teachers and administrator who are “Rock Stars” and eat, breath and extrude master levels of education and 21st Century Competencies. These people "get" the real world and know how to impart a superior education to their students. But the question remains, what are doing for the rest of us?
According to the UNESCO Competency Framework for Teachers (and the ISTE system is very similar) the 6 main areas of competency that learners need to survive in today’s world are:
- Collaboration
- Knowledge Construction
- Use of ICT (Information and Communications Technologies)
- Self-Regulation
- Real World Problem Solving
- Skilled Communication
If we look at some of our ESLR’s we can see that we already talk about these standards, but do we have a way to show our teachers what we mean and how to score if we are on track? This is the realm of Professional Development. “PIL” has some great programs that incorporate live learning with on-line resources - using the same techniques that we would be using with our students! The program comes with rubrics that allow our teachers to self-score themselves to see if their lesson plans meet the above standards and how well.
Some people confuse Digital Literacy (ICT) with 21st Century Competencies. In Professional Development, sometimes we spend too much emphasis on the technology and not enough time on the educational process and environment.
Digital Literacy (ICT) usually includes: (This is the UNESCO standard, ISTE is similar)
- Access - Knowing about and knowing how to collect and/or retrieve information
- Manage - Applying an existing organizational or classification scheme.
- Integrate - Interpreting and representing information - summarizing, comparing and contrasting.
- Evaluate - Making judgments about the quality, relevance, usefulness, or efficiency of information.
- Create - Generating information by adapting, applying, designing, inventing, or authoring information.
- Communicate - Communicate information persuasively to meet needs of various audiences through use of an appropriate medium.
Models like SAMR are great for ICT integration, but we can’t forget the over-all picture.
I would suggest that now is the time for us all to examine what our goals for 21st Century Education are and create in some easy to understand, clear language, a definition that our teachers can work with. From here we can set up some excellent Professional Development opportunities for over the summer. Some can be live-in-person, some live-on-line and some self-directed-on-line.
Below are some excellent resources to start the conversation.
As always, please feel free to share this email and your feedback is very much welcome.
Regards…..
Yossie
