Reflection "Learning, Innovation, and Digital Literacy Skills"

Knowing where to begin, when writing, is most often the hard part for the students I work with. This being said, I've fallen into the same trap. The article, broken into two consecutive chapters, is focused on the 4 c's of learning; critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.

 Furthermore, it identifies the previously held conception of learning ("knowledge --> comprehension --> application --> synthesis --> evolution") and offers the modern taxonomic equivalent, "remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create."

It then goes into a practical explanation of both via a group competition from ThinkQuest 2003

                                                                                           (http://library/thinkquest.org/03oct/00738/) 

Personally, i found the project, which crosses time-zones and continents to be fascinating. To effectively work together, the students had to utilize numerous live applications (not specified) to create a well informed and effective teaching tool in order to educate readers about Sever Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)

It also included an explanation of what it called the 21st Century Skills Rainbow (seen below). I've also included a link to their website for further reading.  

http://www.p21.org/overview/skills-framework

The second chapter focused on digital literacy and began with a brief narrative about what happens when revolutionary ideas come before their time... ie. disaster in the form of, from the story, riots) the warning was clear and it made sense to me in many ways. Information overload can lead to any number of possible troubling situations. there are times in a foreign language class when ive heard the teacher exclaim, "why did i tell them that?" in response to, of course, mentioning off handed, a word or phrase that was not  appropriate. But can we expect the populace not to do very much the same thing with the internet. In a few seconds you can find the means to making bombs or your first souffle. Being able to manage and be responsible for your actions in the age of digital technologies is a key skill... Digital literacy is more important than ever and students need to be able to network, sort through, analyze, and relate what they find.