If you have a computer with internet access in your classroom, here’s an online timer for you. It can count up or down and you can use it with sound or without. If you have a projector connected to your computer, you can let the students watch time slip away…or accumulate. You could have more than one window open to keep track of several students and keep track easily by naming the timers.

http://edtech.kennesaw.edu/intech/javatimer/javatimer.html

I tend to be a neat freak and don’t keep a lot of magazines. However, one article published four years ago that remains in my collection asks some penetrating questions. The article, titled The New Literacy: The 3 Rs Evolve into the 4 Es, was published in Technology and Learning magazine. The authors basically ask “what do students need to be learning today in order to be ready for an unpredictable future?”  Michael Cox, a chief economist for the Federal Reserve Bank, was quoted by the authors as saying that most students will have at least five jobs following graduation, and four of those haven’t even been invented yet. The burning question becomes, do we need to change the way we deliver instruction?

The authors do not suggest that we eliminate the three Rs of education – reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic. Instead, they imply that we need to go a step beyond what has traditionally been taught.

Take, for example, the first ‘r (reading). Instead of just teaching students how to read, they need to learn how to “expose knowledge” (the first “e”). Our goal is to challenge students to find information, decode the information, evaluate the information and finally, organize the information into personal digital libraries. Instead of just teaching students the basic mathematical skills, we face the daunting task of helping them process numbers using various forms of technology, and then utilizing multimedia to explain the interpretation of what the process revealed. Instead of simply writing, the challenge will be teaching students how to write ideas compellingly. This means writing effectively, and communicating with multimedia resources.

The authors suggest the fourth E of ethics. Students need to learn how to discern if information is reliable, how to respect information as the property of others, and the proper use of Internet resources.

The tough question is “How?” How do we find the time to teach these concepts? How do we structure our lessons to deliver the basic components, and at the same time, teach students how to think about these evolving literacies? How do we deliver instruction that is authentic to real-world experiences. These are not an easy questions to answer.

 How do we prepare students for a future that cannot be predicted? What do you think?