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- The Digital Divide
is the inability of certain segments of the population to easily access the Internet, personal computers, and other advanced technologies.
- The Digital Child
is a boy or girl who came into existence and lived his or her whole life in a digital world. This is a child who has never known a time when computers were not an important part of day-to-day life, a time when constant change in the world was not the norm, or a time when it was difficult to access information or to communicate with other human beings with little regard to the actual geographical location of either. Digital children will be the first generation in history who will be "more comfortable, knowledgeable, and literate than their parents about an innovation central to society" (Source: Tapscott 1998). The digital child will know how to work in groups (even if some group members live in other countries and are connected electronically). Digital children experience learning as collaborative and social and involving sharing answers. They seek relevance in learning and they want to solve real problems. They only learn what they need at the moment to solve the current problem, to complete the current project. They instinctively understand that today's knowledge will be useless tomorrow. They will not accept the proposition that they must learn something now because it will be useful 10 years from now. As he or she grows up, the digital child will swim in an ocean of changing technologies and be unaware of any other environment.
- Digital Parents
are parents of digital children. They were not born in a digital world. They grew up in the transformation from an analog world to the digital one. They use and value computers, but they can conceive of a world without them. The Digital Parents and the Digital Child share a number of common characteristics that make them different from the analog parents and analog children from the latter half of the 20th century. Digital Parents expect to custom design the education of their children. They expect to blend and mix educational opportunities afforded by face-to-face classrooms, home schooling, distance learning, private lessons, travel, and other non-profit educational institutions in the community or on the Internet. Digital parents demand quality in education above everything else. They understand that an excellent education is the key to thriving in the Digital World.
- Digital Children must learn to read critically, write effectively, listen intently and speak fluently. They must be able to find information, understand the information they locate, and see how to apply that information to answer a pressing question or to take advantage of a new opportunity. It is critical that they be able to communicate their ideas to diverse groups. They must also be able to understand the ideas of others and see how their own concepts blend with those of others to solve problems and create new things.
- The Digital Curriculum must produce citizens that are extremely discerning. With access to an avalanche of information and countless numbers of human beings, the Digital Child must learn to distinguish the useful from the hype, the genuine from the imitation, the sincere from the "con," the quality from the flash, the truth from the propaganda. He or she must be able to do so quickly and repeatedly.
- For the Digital Child, relationships with other human beings will be the most important aspect of life. Family relationships, personal relationships, community relationships, working relationships and learning relationships all will form the fabric of his or her existence. Unlike the analog 20th century child, however, those relationships will be much less dominated by time and location. The Digital Child must be able to learn with and to play with people whose age, religion, culture, economic status and first language are quite different from those of his Digital Parents. And, most likely, a significant portion of these relationships will be with people who do not live within a thousand miles of the student's home. This is important because, when grown, he or she will be expected to work with people whose age, religion, culture, economic status, first language and location are quite different from his or her own.
- Differentiated Instruction
is teaching individual students using different, altered, or modified means to meet students’ unique developmental needs.
- Distinctive features of the school of the future include flexibility, choice, accountability and quality.
- Network technology and tools will be used as an opportunity to change the teaching/learning dynamic. Components of this change include:
(a) One-on-one learning
(b) Learning by trial and error and discovery
(c) Peer-based learning
(d) Teacher as a facilitator
- The ultimate goal will be to produce a system of curriculum delivery that is guided by the student’s interests and which presents and evaluates discipline-specific material at a variety of levels—from information through mastery. Students will embark on these self-guided journeys with other students whose interests are similar. All journeys will be facilitated and overseen by the teacher, whose role in student learning will increase over the teacher role in the paper and chalk era.
Technology contains the promise of a customized curriculum for each student; a curriculum in which learners participate actively as builders and users of knowledge; a curriculum that not only helps students reach specific goals, but that enables them to go further later on, more easily. In short, a curriculum that is nimble enough, fluid enough and rich enough to meet the needs of each student individually." (Source: Kinnaman, 1999)
- The school of the future will be flexible enough to respond effectively to changes in expectations by the community, industry, educators and parents.
- Technology will enhance the ability of teachers to teach to different learning styles and rates in ways that are rewarding and exciting to students, staff and parents.
- In schools of the future, the lines between what is learning, what is work and what is play will be difficult to distinguish. Decompartmentalization of activity by time and location will tend to blur the lines. Of course, there will be times when the Digital Child will be clearly at play or clearly at work, but there will be many times when these activities are inseparable. Just as 20th century schooling mirrored 20th century adult working, so too will 21st century schooling resemble 21st century adult working.
- Students who will live most of their lives in the 21st Century will be information literate. This means that they have the ability to access, evaluate, and use information. Information literacy is the keystone to lifelong learning. Today's student lives and learns in a world that has been radically altered by the ready availability of vast stores of information in a variety of formats. The information explosion has provided countless opportunities for students and has dramatically altered the knowledge and abilities they will need to live productively in the 21st century. Students must become skillful consumers and producers of information using a range of sources and formats to thrive personally and economically in the communication age.
- Core elements in both learning and information theory suggest that developing expertise in accessing, evaluating, and using information is authentic learning. Learning environments are radically changing to suggest that students, teachers, parents, as well as local, regional, state, national, and international communities are interconnected in a lifelong quest to understand and meet our constantly changing information needs.
The goal is for all students to be active and creative locators, evaluators, and users of information to solve problems and to satisfy their own curiosity. With these abilities, students can become independent, ethical, lifelong learners who achieve personal satisfaction and who contribute responsibly and productively to the learning community and to society as a whole. Schools must provide the tools that students need to become information literate. (Source: American Library Association and the Association for Educational Communication and Technology, 1998.)
- The school of the future will have the funding required for the implementation, maintenance and improvement of technology.
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