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What are we going to do with our wiki and blog at the end of the year?" they asked often. "Can we take it with us to seventh grade and keep recording what we're learning? It would be neat to see what we had at the end of middle school!"

Our students will buy and sell from countries across the world and work for international companies. They will manage employees from other cultures, work with people from different continents in joint ventures and solve global problems such as AIDS and avian flu together.

But what I've grown to realize is that very few people have really embraced the changing nature of a tomorrow that remains poorly defined. We know that the Internet today is far more powerful than ever before---and have heard about companies that are capitalizing on these changes---but we haven't figured out what that means for us. We're jazzed to have access to information and geeked by interactive content providers, but our digital experiences remain somewhat self-centered.

the new National Educational Technology Standards for Students being developed by the International Society for Technology in Education. These standards reflect an increased need to teach children how to use the Internet in new and different ways. Perhaps the most challenging---and important standard---for educators to embrace will this one:Communication and Collaboration: Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others. Students: A. Interact, collaborate and publish with peers, experts or others employing a variety of digital environments and media. B. Communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media and formats. C. Develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures. D. Contribute to project teams to produce original works or solve problems.Does that sound like the digital work being done in your classroom, school, district or state?!

Together with the Center for International Understanding, North Carolina in the World is developing partnerships based on digital collaboration between schools in North Carolina and nations ranging from China to Mexico. Teachers and students in partnering schools are learning to use Web 2.0 tools like web-conferencing and wikis to connect kids across continents. Not only do these efforts help to build a general knowledge of other countries in our children, they are providing concrete opportunities to use technology in new ways.

Access to these tools gives students an opportunity to experience learning in multiple ways, develop a public voice, and compare their own ideas with those of their peers.

The third reason schools will be driven to change is that we have now reached a point where work is learning . Work in the workplace is learning.   Work in the larger community surrounding the schools is about learning every day.   It's not just about putting bolts on things anymore.

The fourth force is that learning communities have no boundaries .   In a networked learning community, schools and classrooms will simply become nodes in a larger learning environment.

The fifth factor affecting schools is that the home is becoming a learning place .

The final force driving change in schools is kid power.  

New learning teams are emerging, which consist of college faculty, the teacher candidates, and the in-service teachers. The high school students themselves are sometimes members of these teams, developing new applications of technology. They are becoming learning communities, “communities of practice,” as some would call it.   And in these learning communities, the distinctions between “teacher” and “student” no longer serve us well. That is why I believe education is rapidly moving toward new learning environments that will have no teachers or students—just learners with different levels and areas of expertise collaboratively constructing new knowledge.

There is no way for the faculty or teachers to collaboratively learn and construct new knowledge in this system—no way for them to know whether the knowledge that might have been acquired by the student teacher is actually the knowledge the student teacher then conveys as a teacher to the K-12 students. Few, if any, of the educators know anything about what the K-12 students might be doing with any of the knowledge they may have acquired after they leave the K-12 classroom.   This is a linear, fragmented teaching approach—the epitome of the factory-era assembly line approach to teaching and learning—which defeats any opportunity for collaborative learning or feedback across the various levels of teaching and teacher preparation.

we educators must first own these technologies and be able to take advantage of these networked learning spaces. In this way, we can fully prepare students not just to be Googled well, but to be findable in good ways by people who share their passions for learning and who may well end up being lifelong teachers, mentors, or friends.

So what literacies must we educators master before we can help students make the most of these powerful potentials? It starts, as author Clay Shirky (2008) suggests, with an understanding of how transparency fosters connections and with a willingness to share our work and, to some extent, our personal lives. Sharing is the fundamental building block for building connections and networks;

In all likelihood, you, your school, your teachers, or your students are already being Googled on a regular basis, with information surfacing from news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, and Facebook groups. Some of it may be good, some may be bad, and most is beyond your control. Your personal footprint—and to some extent your school's—is most likely being written without you, thanks to the billions of us worldwide who now have our own printing presses and can publish what we want when we want to.

This may be the first large technological shift in history that's being driven by children. Picture a bus. Your students are standing in the front; most teachers (maybe even you) are in the back, hanging on to the seat straps as the bus careens down the road under the guidance of kids who have never been taught to steer and who are figuring it out as they go. In short, for a host of reasons, we're failing to empower kids to use one of the most important technologies for learning that we've ever had. One of the biggest challenges educators face right now is figuring out how to help students create, navigate, and grow the powerful, individualized networks of learning that bloom on the Web and helping them do this effectively, ethically, and safely.