Whose job is it?

This week's assigned blogging question is "Whose job is it to teach the NETs and AASL standards to students?" I believe the answer to the question is it's everyone's job; it's the job of classroom teachers, educational technology staff, administrators, counselors, librarians, parents, family members, family friends, peers, and the students themselves. The African proverb, as was made famous in 1996 by Hilary Clinton's book of the same name, "It takes a village to raise a child ", is I believe here apropos. As discussed in my blog post of April 15, 2009, I do believe raising children is done best as a collaborative community effort with assumed joint responsibility. Whether it is the attitudes, facts, habits, knowledge, skills, understandings, or values that a society deems essential that are being taught, each is best taught not by one person at one time but throughout a child's life at opportune times by those around him or her. I believe technological and information literacy is part of this set of essential skills, understandings, and attitudes that all children today need; and as such we all are responsible for providing essential learning experiences at opportune times for the children and young adults (and adults) around us.

Looking specifically at the ISTE NETs and AASL standards in the context of my job as a high school ESL/science teacher at International School Bangkok, I can see how easily either of these two sets of educational technology standards could be woven into the content (course) curricula, the counseling programs, the library programs, and throughout the school and community in order to develop students who are well-prepared and equipped with attitudes, facts, habits, knowledge, skills, understandings, and values they need as 21st Century learners to be able to find success in the world community. The ease of such an integration can be shown using the ISTE NETs standards as an example. With five of the six ISTE NETs strands, excepting strand 6,...

1. Creativity and Innovation
2. Communication and Collaboration
3. Research and Information Fluency
4. Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making
5. Digital Citizenship
6. Technology Operations and Concepts

and the descriptors under each strand,...

2. Communication and Collaboration
Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others. Students:
a. interact, collaborate, and publish with peers, experts, or others employing a variety of digital environments and media.
b. communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media and formats.
c. develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures.
d. contribute to project teams to produce original works or solve problems.

there are benchmarks or learning outcomes that already exist in the ESL and science curricula in the high school at ISB, excepting direct reference to digital environments, media, formats, tools and citizenship. Four general outcomes from ISB's K-12 ESL staged curriculum that best match the descriptors of ISTE NETs strand two above are shown on the linked document to illustrate the above point. Using our existing curricula and linking in specific reference to the digital components of the ISTE NETs or other standards, a more inclusive set of essential skills, understandings, and attitudes that children today need can be easily adopted and articulated in the high school curricula. Less easy perhaps, would be providing the classroom teachers, educational technology staff, administrators, counselors, librarians, parents, family members, family friends, peers, and students with the competence, confidence and motivation to teach these newly adopted standards. Schools and communities thus need to start by building awareness, acceptance and action towards creating learning environments for teachers and students where the skills of a 21st Century learner are articulated, supported and developed.

To this end, I am supportive of and welcoming of ISB's own recently articulated ISB21 Technology and Information Literacy Standards. As a teacher, parent, and member of the ISB community and larger global community, I look forward to the guidance these standards will provide in future unplanned teachable moments as well as planned classroom lessons with the children and young adults of today's large global village.