As always, this year’s Educational Technology Conference was a blast and a lot of work for members of our team. When you’re buried in the details of the day it’s easy for us to get lost as the conference organizers, and not get the opportunity to be teachers. That’s why I always make it a point to give at least one presentation at the conference so I get the opportunity to engage with our teachers and talk about some of the big ideas that we see shaping the use of technology in the classroom.

This year the title of my talk was “Digital Literacy in the 21st Century”, but the more I prepared for my session the more drawn I was to having an interactive experience with my group. As a result, I decided to just open with some broad ideas, including the main idea that even in 2009 we still have trouble defining just what 21st century skills our kids really need. We talk about it a lot, but in the rapidly changing landscape of technology and education it’s mighty hard to pin down what the critical skills are. 

Still, we thought we had a pretty smart group of teachers in our session, so using a free application that allows you to create mind (concept) maps on the fly from Bubbl.us, we set about mapping what we thought were the critical skills our students need. You can view the online version of the concept map we created here at Bubbl.us, or check out the image below that is a screen capture of our ideas.

It was a great session with some awesome teachers. If you’d like to add to our ideas please submit your comments from the link just below the article title. We’d love to hear what you think are the required skills our students should have as we continue forward into the 21st Century.

21st Century Skills