Sunday, April 08, 2007

Aquisition of mechanistic skills does not mean IT literate.

21st Century Skills

Readers of c21skills will know by now that I'm searching for a suitable ICT skills framework that can be adapted to work within my own State Dept of Education.

The best I have come accross so far are the ISTE Nets and the enGauge Framework.

Nets has become the defacto set of skills used in the USA, and even here in Australia we have very similar checklists for what we expect our children to know.

This is all well and good, but a checklist of skills does little to develop the critical thinking and collaborative work habits required of Australias 21st century citizen.

The kindergarten class of 2007 will graduate from high school in 2020! they are going to need alot more than an ability to "use" technology in a mechanistic way.

As good as the skillset in the NETS framework is, the enGauge model has a greater focus on 21st century skills.

Here is a comparison of the NETS skills and the enGauge model.

Note: the NETS standards do not specifically address Visual Literacy, Global
Awareness, Adaptability/Managing Complexity, Curiosity, or Risk-Taking, which are addressed by enGauge.

My thoughts? I'm looking at the enGauge model carefully. It doesnt have an easy checklist format that 20th century teachers seem to love so much, but it has a powerful set of skills that we ignore at our peril.