Are we teaching students to look for help everywhere to solve their problems? 4. There should be a K-12 agreement about which skills and software knowledge our students are going to graduate with. A expected skill set sounds like a good idea but is a list of required software competencies too prescriptive and unrealistic to maintain? Yes….first of all this is exaclty why the NETs for Students does not list software. If we teach software we are teaching a program not a skill. Let’s teach skills and use the appropriate program needed to accomplish the task at hand. Like Andrew points out, it really is unrealistic to maintain a list of all the programs that students have mastered, been exposed to, or know exist. I have seen schools try and do this and I have only seen a mess as the outcome. Students come and go, programs come and go, one year we are teaching X and the next year Y. Teach the skill and choose the program that fits.

Create can be met with paper and pencil, with glue and scissors, with a hammer and nail, or with movie maker and it should be the job of every teacher to expose students to different ways of creating content that fits within their discipline.