Curriculum coordinator Pat Capps recently asked Summit faculty to help in determining 10 core competencies that define Summit graduates. I’m relying on the rest of you to contribute items about character, love of learning, appreciation of the arts … (all things that probably rank higher on my personal list than what I am writing about). But since one of my roles at Summit is to help infuse the curriculum with technology, I have a strong desire to see technology somehow represented in our final picture. I believe we use technology in two basic ways at Summit: 1) to enhance the learning process by providing resources and tools that allow students to learn in more meaningful ways, 2) to prepare students for a somewhat uncertain future that will very possibly require them to use technology in ever-changing ways.
It is this second use of technology that needs to be represented in our portrait of a Summit graduate. I ran across the following information on one of the many blogs I read, but the original source turned out to be the National Council of Teachers of English. Here’s what they have to say about 21st Century Skills, and I think they say it better than I probably could:
Toward A Definition of 21st-Century Literacies
Adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee
February 15, 2008
Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to:
• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments
