Technology and 21st Century Skills

There has been an increased amount of discussion in recent weeks regarding the need for students in Maine, and elsewhere, to be educated to meet standards that include what is often being referred to as “21st Century Skills.”

The Maine Department of Education recently unveiled a new campaign which emphasizes the importance of 21st Century skills and links the idea to the Maine Learning Results and other initiatives such as High School Redesign (formerly known as High School Reform). This comes about at a time when a new report has been released which suggests that America is falling behind in the big technology race. The report, "Maximizing the Impact: The Pivotal Role of Technology in a 21st Century Education System," published by the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, urges renewed emphasis on technology in education.

Following these inputs, there has been an increased amount of discussion about how we are doing in Maine. After all, Maine was one of the first states to embrace technology in the form of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars equipping schools with laptop computers.

Somewhere in all this, the question of efficacy has to be asked and a nice written piece by Patricia Deubel an education consultant and the developer of Computing Technology for Math Excellence at http://www.ct4me.net, does just that.

Entitled, "The Great Debate: Effectiveness of Technology in Education," the article is published on-line in the THE Journal. Deubel lays out a nice summary of the arguments and questions associated with this discussion. She cites a number of works that challenge some of the quick, off-the-cuff thinking we often hear about the issue and she pulls no punches. Everyone who is interested in this topic needs to read, think about, and discuss this article.

~John Brandt