Rethinking education in the age of technology

Re-thinking The Teaching and Learning
Skills in The age of Technology

Authored by : Mohamed Kharbach

www.educatorstechnlogy.com

Table of Content
About The Author................................................................................................................................3

Re-use of This Book.............................................................................................................................4

Disclaimer and / or Legal Notices ............................................................................4

Introduction................................................................................................................................... .......5

The Three Eras of Education :..........................................................................................................7
1- Apprenticeship Era
2- Universal Schooling Era
3- Life-long Learning Era

The difference Between The Three Eras................................................................... .........13

The 21st Century Skills for Students..................................................................15/33

1- Students Expectations
2- Ways to Cater to Students Needs
3- The 21st century Skills Students Need

The 21st century Skills Teachers Need............................................................. 34/40

1- Recommendations for the 21st century Teachers
2- List of Skills Teachers Need to Have

The 21st century skills Teachers and Student need to have


About The Author
Mohamed ( Med ) Kharbach is a Canadian Certified Teacher working at
the Yarmouth Tri-county Regional Schoolboard. He has been teaching
for nine years now. He is also a master student in Mount Saint Vincent
University, department of education in Halifax. He is working on a
thesis about the educational use of emerging technologies in
education.

Mohamed is also a SEO ( Search Engine Optimizer ) and web designer.
He is the editor and owner of two educational blogs. Educational
Technology and Mobile Learning is where he writes about web 2.0
revisions and provides tips for both students and teachers on how to
better implement technology in their classrooms. Educational Mobile
Technology is his second blog where he reviews the best free mobile
apps for both iOS and Android.
You can contact Med at med@educatorstechnology.com or use the
contact form at his blogs.



Reuse of this ebook
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.. I do grant you the full
permission to print and use the content of this ebook as you see fit
provided that you do not charge participants for it. You can also publish
it on your blog or website with proper attribution and provided you do
not charge visitor’ access to it.

DISCLAIMER AND/OR LEGAL NOTICES
The author of this work does not accept any liability or responsibility to
any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage alleged to have
been caused, directly or indirectly, by the information, ideas, opinions
or other content in this transcript.
While every attempt has been made to verify the information provided
here, the author and his referrals cannot assume any responsibility for
errors, inaccuracies or omissions.



Introduction

Ever since the start of this new millennium, “ 21st century skills “ has
been a catch-phrase racketing around education and business world. It
is still gaining momentum and will definitely do so for the coming years.
We are leaving behind and entire thousand-year set completely
different from the one we are advancing into. No two persons can even
differ over the huge change humanity has witnessed in the last decade.
National Geography magazine In its last printed version,” the Top 100
Amazing Inventions “ has stated that in the last ten years scientists
have unearthed more knowledge and facts than what the entire
humanity have achieved since its creation. Yes this is jaw dropping.
Science is developing in such a tremendous way that life in 2050
would completely be different from all kinds of lives that Man has ever
known.

Technology is looked upon as the primary engine of these
transformations. AAs educators our focus will be narrowed down to
just education. This latter is where the change is starkly noticed. The
advancement of technology has swept away every traditional aspect of
education . Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, Blogs, Social
Networking, iPhones to mention but some have all had their say in this
transformation.



Digital era, information age, knowledge era are new terms that we
start hearing recently because of this digital boom. We live in a digital
world where computers, tablets and mobile devices are predominant. If
you are under the age of 31 you grew up surrounded by digital media.
Our students are digital natives . They don’t know anything else, this is
their lifestyle. They also know that they are different from” digital
immigrants” who are those people who learned to “ do technology”
later in life. There is even a growing digital divide between students and
some of their old fashioned teachers who are still resisting the change.
This results in an unhealthy learning environment that has severe
repercussions on the entire learning and teaching process. This is
exactly where this ebook fits in. It tries to help in bridging the gap
between teachers and students via providing some tips and ideas that
might help teachers and students hone in their differences and work
hand in hand in the development of our schooling.



The Three Eras of Education
In their book ‘ Rethinking Education in The Age of Technology ’ Allan
Collins and Richard Halverson have elaborately discussed the major
transformational eras that education has gone through before it
becomes what it is now. To understand today’s education I deem it
important that you have an idea of what these great authors have
written in this regard. The book talks about the American educational
system as an example which we can apply to many other educational
systems around the globe.

According to Allan and Richard education has gone through three
phases : the first one is called Apprenticeship an which lasted until the
19th century, the second one is called Universal Schooling which was
prevalent in the 20th century and the last one is called Life Long
Learning that is actually taking place.



1- The Apprenticeship Era

Until the 19th century, education was largely the responsibility of
parents. Most people were farmers, and children learned the skills they
needed, whether it was reading and counting or plowing and sewing,
from their parents or other kin. This was the apprenticeship system,
where individual children were taught all they needed to know by those
close to them. Where people
took up other occupations, such
as crafts or midwifery,
apprenticeship was the way they
learned these occupations.
Often, they were apprenticed to
a friend or relative of the family,
if not to their parents. They
learned by observation,
imitation, and guided practice. As Lawrence Cremin states,” In general
the pedagogy of household education was the pedagogy of
apprenticeship, that is a relentless round of imitation, explanation, and
trial and error.”



2- Universal Schooling

In early 19th century New England Horace Mann led a movement
toward Universal Schooling that shifted the responsibility of educating
children from the family to the state. This movement resulted mainly
from a chain of events that included: The invention of the printing
press, the Reformation, the American Revolution and the Industrial
Revolution. The last of these was the real precipitating event that
caused the push for universal schooling among a group of
humanitarians concerned
with the welfare of children
in an industrial society. The
school structures and
institutions that evolved in
the first 100 years of
Universal Schooling solved a
set of problems facing a
growing an urbanizing country in very efficient and effective ways.

Here are the main pieces that constructed the interlocking system of
universal schooling and that also solved many of the educational
problems faced in the process of creating this system.

Compulsory Attendance: This was the main thrust of the universal
schooling. Its goal was to ensure that the populace was educated



enough to make wise political decisions since the control of the
government at that period was turned over to the public.

Graded Schools: This was a response to the problems created by the
huge increase in students brought on by compulsory attendance.
Working with students of the same age reduced the amount of
curricular knowledge for teachers and made it easier to control classes.

Tests: tests were used to sort students into classes where they have
the same ability. They were used to track the progress of students
through the system so that they would advance to the next grade
based on demonstrating that they had mastered the material covered
in the current grade.

Textbooks: textbooks were introduced to solve the problem of what
students should learn. This was necessary to provide some uniformity
in what students were learning in the different schools across the
country.

Carnegie Units: Carnege units addressed the problem of uniformity
across a very diverse country. By specifying what courses should cover,
they allow students to move from one school to the other with some
coordination in what the students learn. In particular, it allows colleges
and universities to determine what students have studied in high
school and whether they have been adequately prepared to take on a
course of study in college. In a highly mobile society, such as America,
the kind of coordination provided by Carnegie units is essential to
placing students when they change schools.

Comprehensive High Schools: These allowed schools to offer a diversity
of courses to suit different kinds of students. They were part of the


solution to the problem of how to meet the learning needs of a wide
variety of students.

The system that evolved from all of the aforementioned features
proved to be very effective in educating a highly diverse population. But
the society has continued to change, while these features have been
locked in place for over 100 years. So the pressures are building for new
solutions to the problems of education.

3- Life Long Learning Era

With the advance of technology and telecommunications the seeds of a
new educational system started to blossom giving birth to what is now
called Life-Long Learning. These seeds
can be seen in the explosive growth
of home schooling, workplace
learning, distance education, adult
education, learning centres,
educational television and videos,
computer-based learning software,
technical certifications, and Internet
Cafes. Many of these seeds will affect the learning of children, but
many others will affect people of all ages, as learning becomes a
lifelong enterprise. The face of education is changing rapidly and it
remains to be seen exactly what form it will take.



When taken together, the cumulative effect of these innovations is to
extend learning throughout life and over many venues. With time,
these pieces might come to comprise the fragments of a new system of
education in which schools are pushed to the peripheral role in learning
that they once occupied in the era of apprenticeship. But for now,
these elements have developed independently of one another. They do
not in any sense form a coherent system of education. That is where
the need for visionaries is most apparent. It will take a new group of
energetic visionaries to once again do the kind of work that Horace
Mann and his colleagues did, that is to figure out how to build an
equitable and coherent system from these emergent technological
pieces.



Difference between the three eras of education
As we moved from the apprenticeship era to the universal schooling,
then to the life long learning era, there occurred many changes on a
number of different dimensions. Who was responsible for children’s
education, what was the purpose and the content of their education,
how were they to be taught and
assessed, and what did we expect them
to learn. There were akso changes in
the location of where learning took
place, the culture in which learning
occurred, and the relationship between
teachers and learners.

Here is a brief review of these changes:

Responsibility: From parents ( in the apprenticeship era) to the state (
in the universal schooling era) to individuals and parents ( in life long
era)

Expectations: From social reproduction ( in 1st era) to success for all (
2nd era) to individual choice ( 3rd era ).



Content: From practical skills ( 1st era) to disciplinary knowledge ( 2nd
era) to learning how to learn ( 3rd era ).

Pedagogy: from apprenticeship ( 1st era) to didacticism ( 2nd era ) to
interaction ( 3rd era ).

Assessment: From observation ( 1st era) to Testing ( 2nd era ) to
embedded assessment ( 3 rd era ).

Location: From home ( 1st era ) to school ( 2nd era ) to anywhere ( 3rd
era ).

Culture: From adult culture ( 1st era ) to peer culture ( 2nd era) to
mixed-age culture ( 3rd era ).

Relationships: From personal bonds ( 1st era) to authority figures ( 2nd
era) to Computer-mediated interaction ( 3rd era).

That was in brief what Allan Collins and Richard Halverson have covered
in their book “ Rethinking Education in The Age of Technology “, a book
which I highly recommend for you to read. There are more interesting
facts that they provided and that I could not include here because of
the constraints of space.



The 21st Century Skills for Students

1-Students Expectations

Today’s students are digitally focused. The average student spends at
least 4 hours daily interacting with their digital gadgets. This digital
culture which has permeated our kids’ life has brought about a set of
changes to their learning habits some are positive and some are
negative. The worst aspect of them all is the short attention span. It is
very hard to maintain a
student’s attention for longer
time posing the question of
contemplative creative thinking.

When you look at creativity
from this perspective it sheds a
lot of light on the debate
educational technologies have
been having recently over the power of Internet on students brains. Are
students getting overwhelmed with an always connected multi tasking
lifestyle? Is that going to lead to less sophisticated thought as they
move away from the slower, deeper and contemplative state of reading
for instance?



I think it is very important here to remember that the greater driver of
scientific innovation and technological inventions has been the historic
increase in connectivity, the ability to reach out and exchange ideas
with other people, that has been more than anything else the primary
engine of creativity and innovation. Yes it is true students are more
distracted when using
digital media but what is
really so miraculous and
marvelous is their ability
to access a plethora of
ways to connect and
reach out and find other
learners who have that missing piece of information that would
complete the idea they are working on. That is the real lesson of where
good ideas come from. The chance favours the connected mind.

So to better cater to the needs of such a group of learners we need to
know their expectations. And according to a recent study in this regard,
Today’s students have various expectations such as:



 Freedom to choose and express their personal views and
individual identities
 Customization and Personalization
 Scrutiny: detailed, behind the scene analysis
 Integrity and openness in their interactions with others
 Entertainment and play to be integrated into their work, learning
and social life
 Collaboration and relationships to be a vital part of what they do
 Speed in communications, getting information, and getting
responses to questions and messages
 Innovation in their lives

Ways to Cater to Students 21st century Needs

Now that we know their expectations, how are we going to personalize
their learning and make them perform better while respecting their
mind sets?

Obviously ‘ a one-size-fits-all’ factory model and one-way broadcast
approach to learning does not work well for these students’. Trilling
and Fadel found five key findings that may help guide and reshape
learning to meet our students’ needs:



1. Create more authentic learning experiences. Students need
more real-world problem solving, internships in real work
settings.

2. Allow mental model building,
students should be put into situations
that incorporate new experiences that
change their views over time.
3. Create lessons that have an
emotional connection to what is being
learned.
4. Create more personalized
learning opportunities for students.
Differentiate!
5. Embed social learning into
lessons. Online communication is an
option.



The 21st century Skills Students Need

After this brief analysis of the expectations and the ways we can cater
to our students learning needs, we need to know what the skills most
important to their learning are. Of course as education is changing so
do the skills we as teachers need to focus on. The skills the 20th century
students need to develop during their schooling are different from the
ones of the 20th century.

To better prepare students for post school life, teachers need to
encourage and help students acquire the following skills:

Passion for the digital

I think most of the students have it now but still teachers need to make
sure students are aware of the technological challenges of the future.
Equipping students with the basic technological skills is the key
solution. This includes the understanding and using of :



Internet Search

Students need to know how to
effectively search online using key
words and modifiers. This skill will
help them not only in their schooling
but also in their life in general. Here
are some articles I recommend for
developing this skill:

Three Effective Ways to Search The
Web

Google Search tips



Office Suite Skills

Students need to know how to
open a word document, edit and
share it, use a spreadsheet, create
a form, make a survey, create a
presentation and embed it
somewhere else. Open Office /
Libre Office, Microsoft Word, and
Google Docs all can help students
develop this skill.



The Use of Social Media

Social networking sites such
as Twitter, Facebook,
YouTube, And Stumble
Upon are not just for
socialising, they can be of
great educational help.
Students need to know how
to benefit from these free
services in exchanging ideas
and getting to know other students and sharing the knowledge. They
can also use them to work on class projects and assignments. Blogs are
also another learning element that students can use. There are many
free blogging platforms where you can start your free blog: Blogger and
Wordpress are great places to start with. Mastering the social
networking skill can open up many promising horizons for students in
the future.



Filtering and assessing Web content

Internet is ripe with content covering everything you look for. Students
often use it to look for information they need in their school projects.
Just typing in the search query and clicking on the first search results is
not enough to ensure that the content is trustworthy and has a degree
of credibility. Many web sites owners use malicious techniques to trick
search engines and get higher page rank. This is a serious issue for our
students who do not know anything about this matter. We need to
teach them that when they perform a search online and land on a web
page that answers their query they have to look first for the author of
the article, check his
authority in the field he is
writing about. They can
start with quickly reading
his bio if possible, his
professional and scholarly
background. They also
need to check the rank of
his web page using very
simple tools such as Google
Page Rank and Alexa. There are extensions and add-ons that students
can install on their browsers to constantly check the rank of web pages.
The content from an article that ranks 7 or 8 is more likely to be



credible than the one from a website that ranks 1 or 2. I personally use
both the Alexa and Google page rank checker on my Chrome browser
and whenever I am in a website the first thing I do is to look up and see
their rankings. Google assigns a page rank to every website online It
uses numbers from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest. Alexa also
classifies websites according to their total page views, their backlinks
and popularity .It starts from millions to 1 with number 1 being the top.

Typing Skill

Typing which is disregarded by many learners can be a real pain in the
back when preparing a classroom project. Learning how to type fast
and accurately is a skill
much needed even
outside school in the
market place. We are
living in a fast paced
world and the quicker
you do things the better
chances you get. I have
some resources for
students to develop their typing skills. These are mainly interactive
games and exercises that they can use from time to time to master
their keyboarding.



Check out these resources:

Free Resources to Develop Typing Skills

Test and Improve your Typing

Staying secure and safe online

Students need to learn how to
keep their identities and data safe
from intruders and hackers. The
web is full of scammers and unless
we take our precautions we might
be a victim of one of them one
day. Here are some resources for
online safety to check out

Free Tools and Resources about Internet Safety

Google Good to Know: Everything you Need to Know about Staying Safe
Online

Google Plus: Safety Guide for Parents and Students



Back up Data or Plan B

As students use the web to
work on projects and
assignments from school, it is
important that they know how
to back up their data for a rainy
day. Prevention is better than
cure. Here are some resources
on backing up data.

Google Takeout Back up your Data

Free Resources to Back up your Files



Respecting Creative Commons and Copy Right

When students create multimedia projects they might be tempted to
simply do a Google Images search and use the first images they see. But
as educators and teachers, we have a responsibility to teach students
to respect copyright holders’ rights. One of the ways that we can do
that is by teaching students how to use Creative Coomons and Copy
Right Infringements. Let us take
the use of images as an example.

Students need to know that
images that are shared on the
net are pretected by copyright.
This means that they can not just
take images that someone else
has made and use them as their
owns. Using someone else’s work without permission is called “
Copyright Infringement”. This can get people in trouble.

Fortunately enough, some people are reluctant to share their work so
that others can re-use. Creative Commons is an organisation that gives
out licenses for people to share their work ( like the photos they’ve
taken or pictures they’ve drawn). Students can use these kind of images
on their multimedia projects and blog posts as long as they attribute


the image. Attributing the image means adding a caption under the
image to say who made the image and where you got it from.

Here are some websites where students can get images with a Creative
Commons License:

 Morgue File
 Wylio
 Edupic Graphical Resource
 The World Images Kiosk
 Image Base
 Photo 8
 Google Images
 Yahoo Images
 Animal Photos

Analytical Thinking and Application

Students need to be able to scan and sift
through information and determine what the
important information is, and what should be
omitted.



Crtitical Thinking

Students need to be able to
think for themselves, learn
on their own, understand
and access facts and
figures and engage and
interact positively with a
team environment.



Communication skills

Students need to learn how to
maintain a good communicative
behaviour. They need to learn
how to listen to others when they
speak and judiciously judge
arguments and facts. Effective
communicative skills are
necessary for the job market and for life as a whole.



Responsibility

Students need to learn how
to accept to be accountable
for their actions and learn to
accept change in a fast-
moving digital environment
in which transformation is
inevitable and necessary.

Citing Resources

This is a skill much needed in a world full of plagiarisers, but as
educators we need
show our students
how to grow up
respecting others
copyrights and
properly citing their
resources when
working on a
research or a
classroom project. Here are some articles to help you teach this skill



Taking The Mystery out of Copyright

Citation Help Resources

Finding and Using Mobile Educational Apps

The world is going mobile and the majority of our students own a
mobile gadget of some sort. Studies have shown that kids spend more
than 4 hours interacting with their mobile appliances which is a huge
amount of time compared to how much time left for other tasks. As
educators, we need make
sure to keep our students
with the right mobile
apps to install on their
devices. There are tons of
learning materials
included in the apps
market. These apps offer
help in a variety of topics
such as learning languages, Math, Physics, Geography, History,
Technology, and many more. Most of these apps are also free so why
not leverage them to our favour. Here are some links where you can
get learning apps



 Socratica
 Quixey
 Appsylum

The list of these skills is not conclusive, We might have missed some
other skills here but at least the ones mentioned above are the top
ones and have the priority over all. Before we move to teachers skills
let me share with you this diagram published on theatlantic.com in
which students skills are organized according to their importance in the
voters eyes.



The 21st century Skills Teachers need

As is the case with students, Teachers too need to develop some crucial
skills to fit in the 21st century educational paradigm. This extensive
digitisation of education is driving educational experts and pedagogues
to come up with new theories
of how to leverage the
potential of technology in the
classroom and in the course
of making this possible,
teachers who are the main players in the education equation need to
have certain skills to make this transformation smooth .

Let me first share with you two awesome videos on how some
teachers are and how they should be.

First video : Watch this video to see some unhealthy practices that
some teachers still do.( http://youtu.be/w3PhJDxvgJM )

Second Video: Watch this one here to see how the 21st century
teachers are like. (http://youtu.be/a7-QIZnCD2Y )



Here is a set of recommendations for the 21st century teachers to
reconsider in order to adequately prepare today's students for their
future:

 Share and model the use of current internet tools
 Participate in professional networks
 Assist students as they build their learning networks
 Provide sufficient learning opportunities for students to become
digitally literate
 Inspire every child to be quality digital global citizens.

The 21st century teachers are characterized by certain holistic and
student centered features , some of them are summarized below .
Gratitude and thanks go back to Andrew Churches who has provided
this diagram .



The risk taker:

Teachers should not wait for others to take the initiative , they have to
be the lead. Show your students that
everything can be learnt through risk
and initiative taking and sometimes
surrender yourself to your students’
knowledge . They will definitely love
you and trust you even more and guess
what ? This trust is the key to better
learning and engagement.



The Collaborator :

The central theme in your work should always be collaboration .
Incorporate the collaborative tools web2.0 offers .They are free and
highly effective. Ning ,Bebo, Myspace,
Secondlife, Msn, blogger and wikispaces are but
some few examples, Educational Technology
and Mobile Learning and several other
edublogs will provide you with the necessary
tools to start with.



The model :

Teachers' job is not just instilling information in
students minds though instilling is not a proper
term to use, but they are also there to give the
exemplary model of how the life long learner
should be. Students are very much influenced
by their teachers' behaviors therefore the 21st
century teachers need to model several
characteristics such as :

 Reflective thinking and practice
 Tolerance
 Coexistence
 Affection, love , tenderness
 Love of technology and digital information
 Global awareness



The leader :

To better understand the notion of
leadership there is nothing better than
to read an awesome paper created by
Thousand and Villasand
entitled Managing complex
change towards inclusive schooling .

The visionary :

Teachers must be imaginative . They need to foresee the potential of
the emerging technologies, look into other areas
of the curricula and across disciplines, make links
that enhance and value learning in other fields to
leverage this knowledge and reinforce their
teaching and the learning of their students .



The learner :

Learning is a continuous process , a
life long commitment to knowledge ,
teachers should always seek
knowledge everywhere using
technology . The world is dynamic
and the horizons and landscapes are
changing so do the teachers’ needs
and skills.

The communicator :

the 21st century teacher should be fluent in the use of communication
and information technologies ,know how to facilitate, stimulate,
control, moderate and manage them.

The adaptor :

Different as they are the modes of learning , teachers should always
make their teaching styles adaptive to :
 The new curriculum requirements
 The emerging web2.0 technologies

 The various age groups and abilities

 The new dynamic teaching experiences.



Here are some other free resources for teachers and students:

 80 Educational Alternatives to YouTube
 The Ultimate Guide to Google’s Search Features for Teachers and
Students
 Free Kids-safe Websites: Learning Tools for Young Learners
 The Comprehensive Guide To Google’s Free Tools for Educators
and Teachers.
 A List of Free Educational Android and iOS Apps.
 21 Educational Infographics
 Free URL Shortner Tools
 Free Math Resources: Lesson Plans, Activities and Games.
 16 Free Typing Resources.
 Free Apps for Students with Visual and Hearing Impairment.
 A List of Free Graphic Organizers for Teachers and Students.
 Free Online Safety Tools for Teachers and Students

Find more of similar educational presentations at this page
For more reviews of educational web tools and technology tips on how
to learn and teach using technology I invite you to explore the free
resources included in:

Educational Technology and Mobile Learning
www.educatorstechnology.com
Educational Mobile Technology
www.freemobiletech.com

Thank you.


Rethinking education in the age of technology

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