Abstract: Attendees will be given an understanding of what digital literacy means today in the context of a need to develop students ready to enter 21st century workplaces and to be ready for the demands of college. In this connection we will also review a number of efforts to define digital literacy more broadly as not just functional operational literacy but as including higher order thinking skills, global awareness and media literacy. We will use examples of student work as well as the assignments and rubrics they responded to which illustrate the sorts of skills that reflect not just exemplary use of digital tools, but also illustrate the deeper critical thinking and global awareness that must be part of today’s 21st century classroom.. Attendees will be invited to think about what changes they need to make to their own classrooms and their pedagogy to be truly assisting students to meet a more challenging workplace environment. In order to facilitate the kinds of shifts necessary attendees will draft their own lesson plans, sample assignments digital tools and rubrics that foster a more advanced kind of learning.

Objectives

Participants will be able to understand the different ways 21st century digital skills have been defined since No Child Left Behind legislation required in 2001 that all students be digitally literate by the 8th grade. We will examine the definitions used by ISTE National Education Technology Standards (NETS) as well as organizations like Educational Testing Service which created the iSkills Assessment, a test to measure critical thinking and problem-solving in a digital environment and as those used by the. 21st century Skills Partnership. We will further examine in closer detail how global awareness and fits in with some of these definitions and to what extent these skills relate to the growing movement to define and test for college and 21st century career readiness. Attendees will be trained to be leaders in their schools helping their colleagues to sort through some of the confusing jargon and confusions as they prepare to answer questions such as i) What do exemplary 21st century students digital literacy skills look like? What kinds of assignments do they best respond to? How best to grade them? In doing this we will draw examples from a community of 73 technologically savvy teachers we have been in touch with over the course of two years since we have been giving these workshops at SITE and elsewhere and will categorize the kinds of assignments that have produced some of the best work and connect them to the relevant standards and assessments. ii) What is the research based rationale for a shift away from a single culture centric classroom to a classroom that is inclusive of global perspectives? iii) What tools can I use to measure my progress with respect to the creation of a 21st century global classroom?

Topical Outline

We will begin the session by interactively asking and then discussing the following questions: 1) What does a 21st century classroom look like ? What kind of work do 21st century students complete? What kinds of assignments do they best respond to? 2) How do the examples of student work (we will briefly show them) compare and relate to the standards that have been described by various organizations such as ETS and the Partnership for 21st century skills? 3) How do these standards relate to career readiness and college readiness? 4) We will illustrate the intersections of the above standards on a matrix that will be a takeaway handout that can be used by attendees in their classrooms 5) What changes in teacher practice and pedagogy needs to occur to realize some of the changes to create a more globally aware digitally literate student who exhibits the kind of higher order thinking skills required by the more challenging 21st century workforce? 6) We will examine in more detail the elements of an effective assignment that meets the needs of the relevant standards including career and college readiness and show relevant rubrics and sample student responses. 7) We will ask attendees to develop their own and each attendee either individually or in groups will have an opportunity to present them and gain feedback 8) We will summarize major points and review a set of free or inexpensive resources that can be used to supplement and enrich 21st century classrooms. Teachers at the end of the workshop will have a number of lesson plans and other useable materials including assignments, rubrics and evaluative tools.

Prerequisites

The intended audience are technology coordinators and administrators of school systems as well as professors of education technology who prepare teachers. Prerequisites: Teachers would benefit from bringing laptops, netbooks or tablet computers to the workshop. We will be asking them to access several different sites related to their own subject and content area.

Experience Level

Intermediate

Qualifications

Laurence Peters, Ph.D has taught as an adjunct professor of graduate education at University of Maryland University College and the University of Maryland and currently serves Vice President of the National Education Foundation a leading global non profit e-learning organization After serving as a Senior Policy advisor at the US Department of Education and and directing the Mid Atlantic Regional Technology in Education Consortium (MARTEC), he has devoted his energies to professional development issues related to integration of global education technologies in the curriculum. Dr Peters recently published "Global Education: Using Technology to Bring the World to Your Students", (ISTE 2009) and "Scaling Up Success : Lessons from Technology Based Educational Improvement" with Chris Dede and James Honan (Jossey Bass) 2005 and has authored numerous other publications including contributing to Childrens' Learning in a Digital World edited by Willoughby,T., and Wood, E. (Blackwell 2008).