The ISTE Standards provide a framework for skills needed by both students and teachers if they are to survive and be successful in the 21st Century. These skills help teachers integrate technology and digital devices into their classroom, content, and assessments.
The skills provided for students include:
- Creativity and innovation
- Communication and collaboration
- Research and information fluency
- Critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making
- Digital citizenship
- Technology operations and concepts
The skills provided for teachers include all of the students skills and these additional skills:
- Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity
- Design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments
- Model digital age work and learning
- Promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility
- Engage in professional growth and leadership
All of the skills listed are important for several reasons. The ISTE website lists those reasons as:
- Improving higher-order thinking skills, such as problem solving, critical thinking and creativity
- Preparing students for their future in a competitive global job market
- Designing student-centered, project-based and online learning environments
- Guiding systemic change in our schools to create digital places of learning
- Inspiring digital age professional models for working, collaborating and decision making
Many of the reasons listed go hand in hand with the reason I am pursuing my STEM certificate. I feel very strongly that our children need to be as prepared as possible to enter into a really tough job market. Some of our students will never attend college so the more prepared we can make them now the better off they will be. In my somewhat limited experience in our public schools it seems that the STEM school really do put more emphasis on incorporating technology into their classrooms. Sure the non-STEM classrooms have SmartBoards, microphones, and a few computers available to their students but it is more about using it for delivering instruction and not about getting the students more involved in its use. Students need the hands-on experience with these tools in order to improve the knowledge of them.
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