Cheryl Lemke is the first keynote speaker. She is President and CEO of the Metiri Group, an educational technology consulting company. Her talk is about the changes that need to be made in education to address the needs of 21st century learners.

Cheryl is talking about the current job market and the need for students to be prepared for a knowledge economy. She says that 50% of jobs in the U.S. are with companies that have fewer than 25 employees. Industrial workers are measured by their efficiency. Knowledge workers are measured by their effectiveness. Kids born after 1983 are called “millennials” and have different needs than students from earlier eras. (It will be interesting to see how her comments fit with Prensky’s digital immigrant-digital native work.)

Key 21st century skills include digital-age literacy, inventive thinking, effective communication, and high productivity. These aren’t new concepts for educators. We could use this list of skills as another filter for our existing curriculum. Check out the Born To Be Wired Web site for more information about what today’s students are like.

Five responses to school tasks: authentic engagement, ritual engagement, passive compliance, retreatism, rebellion. The Metiri Group did a survey of a midwestern high school and found only 15% of the students fit in the “authentic engagement” category. Cheryl showed a video demonstrating how students can be engaged in simple problems like learning to calculate slope equations using simulations via the IMMIX site. The work the students did hit on many 21st century skills beyond the basic mathematical operation of calculating slope.

It’s possible to affect students’ ability to direct their own learning. Teachers can encourage or inhibit self-direction based on the way they interact with students. Too much testing inhibits self-direction. (Are you listening Federal Dept. of Ed?)

There is a study out by Fred Newmann called Improving Chicago’s Schools that examines the type of assignments that teachers give their students. His conclusion was that teachers who give intellectually stimulating assignments produce higher-achieving students. Instead of “drill and kill” exclusively for kids who need basic skill development, make sure those students get a chance for more challenging work. Markers of stimulating assignments include relevance beyond the school day, deep knowledge required, and construction of new knowledge.

Her final questions: Is it malpractice if teachers don’t take advantage of technology that is known to be effective? Whose malpractice is it? Teahcer, administrators, or both.

Links to the sites Cheryl mentioned are available on the Web.