Give a man a fish, teach a man to fish?

In order to write about what literacies students must acquire in order to be successful in the future, I spent some time at the website of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Ohio has joined the Partnership and technology skills will be woven into the instructional strategies and general skills of the new Model Curriculum. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, among other things, outlines skills students will need. One big segment of the outcomes are the Information, Media, and Technology Skills. These read very similar to the NETS-S, indicating that students will need to be comfortable using a variety of technological tools to create media, organize information, and assess the value of media, information and technology.

Certainly educators will play a major role in helping students acquire these skills. Yet, they will face many obstacles in this quest. In Ohio, school funding remains a mess, leaving school districts with the unhappy position of finding a way to do more with less. Technology costs money and given the choice between technology and teachers, I would choose teachers! However, one of the strengths of the Web 2.0 tools we have learned about is that many are free (at least in some version). Though schools may not have computer labs outfitted with all the latest gadgets, many people have access to a computer. Teachers then could post how-to videos on their websites or embed them into their blogs and students could access them and learn about the technology whenever and wherever they can. Another challenge to helping students learn about the variety of tools available to help them organize information and create media would be that educators themselves often do not know how to do this. Again many free resources exist, but often the stress barrier is so high that teachers will not endeavor to learn these skills without assistance. A wise man once told me that if something is so great, so classroom-changing that it cannot be resisted, teachers will learn how to do it because, at their core, they are learners. I think he was right on the money with this statement, but school districts need to provide time and support for teachers to learn the things that THEY know they need to learn.

The good news is that I don't think educators will need to re-think their curriculum or content in order to help students with the 21st century skills. As with all things, balance and moderation are key. Students should be exposed to a variety of presentation methods -- sometimes the chalkboard is most effective; other times a wiki will best get the job done. Teachers need to selectively use the best technology to teach whatever is on their plan for the day. Instead of looking at it as "we need to teach them to blog because they'll all have to blog someday," we must teach them to learn with whatever method is available and best because students will have to learn for the rest of their lives. Learning to learn is still the most important skill of all.