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The framework is built around three major dimensions: scientific and engineering practices; cross-cutting concepts that unify the study of science and engineering; and core ideas in four disciplinary areas—physical sciences, life sciences, earth and space sciences, and engineering, technology, and the applications of science.

In setting the stage for the framework, the committee points to its concerns about the current state of science education in the United States. “It is not organized systematically across multiple years of school, emphasizes discrete facts with a focus on breadth over depth, and does not provide students with engaging opportunities to experience how science is actually done,” the document says. “The framework is designed to directly address and overcome these weaknesses.”

“Engineering and technology are featured alongside the natural sciences ... for two critical reasons: to reflect the importance of understanding the human-built world, and to recognize the value of better integrating the teaching and learning of science, engineering, and technology,”

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” A world where all can use Twitter but hardly any can commute by air is less impressive than the futures dreamed of in the past.

e notes that, for all its inhabitants’ Googling and Skypeing, America’s productivity performance since 2004 has been worse than that of the doldrums from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.

esearch by Susanto Basu of Boston College and John Fernald of the San Francisco Federal Reserve suggests that the lag between investments in information-and-communication technologies and improvements in productivity is between five and 15 years. The drop in productivity in 2004, on that reckoning, reflected a state of technology definitely pre-Google, and quite possibly pre-web.

nnovation is what people newly know how to do. Technology is what they are actually doing; and that is what matters to the economy.

n the end, the main risk to advanced economies may not be that the pace of innovation is too slow, but that institutions have become too rigid to accommodate truly revolutionary changes—which could be a lot more likely than flying cars.

he exact curriculum for the year — or just how staff will b

implementing coding into each discipline — is still open-ended.

Brown says she's considering a poetry unit using code language. Kader Adjout, head of the Global History and Social Sciences department, is planning to have his students design — through code — interactive graphs to correlate with their research papers. Tina Farrell, who heads the Performing Arts department, is interested in experimenting with live-coding performances, where students would use software to compose and perform music with scripts they write.

It's difficult to trace back to when the American education curriculum began. Why, for example, do students at public schools take biology before chemistry? Chemistry before physics? And algebra before geometry?

Hutton doesn't believe the education field is one to be viewed as "risk-averse" — the play-it-safe or uphold-the-status-quo methods just aren't cutting it anymore.

We don't need to engineer a workshop so every kid that graduates here becomes a professional programmer," he says. "We just want them to think about new ways to solve issues, and grasp that entrepreneurial mindset early on. It's ... it's just this day and age."

You know that searching various areas of the Web requires a variety of search tools. You are the information expert in your building. You are the search expert in your building. You share an every growing and shifting array of search tools that reach into blogs and wikis and Twitter and images and media and scholarly content.

You open your students to evolving strategies for collecting and evaluating information. You teach about tags, and hashtags, and feeds, and real-time searches and sources, as well as the traditional database approaches you learned way back in library school.

You work with learners to exploit push information technologies like RSS feeds and tags and saved databases and search engine searches relevant to their information needs.

You know that communication is the end-product of research and you teach learners how to communicate and participate creatively and engagingly. You consider new interactive and engaging communication tools for student projects. ● Include and collaborate with your learners. You let them in. You fill your physical and virtual space with student work, student contributions—their video productions, their original music, their art.

Know and celebrate that students can now publish their written work digitally. (See these pathfinders: Digital Publishing, Digital Storytelling)

Your collection–on- and offline–includes student work. You use digital publishing tools to help students share and celebrate their written and artistic work.

You welcome and host telecommunications events and group gathering for planning and research and social networking.

You realize you will often have to partner and teach in classroom teachers’ classrooms. One-to-one classrooms change your teaching logistics. You teach virtually. You are available across the school via email and chat.

many businesses are now finding that the pace of change demanded by the global economy and facilitated by various technologies is requiring them to rethink how they are organized. Many are restructuring themselves as learning organizations—organizations in which new learning and innovation are the engines that drive the company.

Knowledge Forum is, of course, not the only online learning environment available. Others of note include FirstClass, WebCT, and Blackboard. Palloff and Pratt (2001) note that, whatever online environment is used, "attention needs to be paid to developing a sense of community in the group of participants in order for the learning process to be successful"

How does it work? In practice, the teacher presents students with a problem of understanding relevant to the real world. It could be a question such as What is the nature of light? or What makes a society a civilization? The focus here is to make student ideas, rather than predetermined activities or units of knowledge, the center of the classroom work. The next step is to get the students to generate ideas about the topic and write notes about their ideas in the Knowledge Forum (KF) database, an online environment with metacognitive enhancements to support the growth of the knowledge-building process. In generating these ideas, the students form work groups around similar interests and topics they wish to explore. These groups are  self-organized and dynamic; the teacher does not select the members, and members can join or leave as they choose. Idea generation can take place during these group sessions, during which all students are given the chance to express their ideas, or in individual notes posted directly to the KF database. While in a typical classroom setting ideas or comments generated in discussion are usually lost, the KF database preserves these ephemeral resources so that students can return to them for comment and reflection. Students are then encouraged to read the notes of other students and soon find that there are differing schools of opinion about the problem. The teacher's job is to ensure that students remain on task and work towards the solution of the problem under study by reading each other's notes and contributing new information or theories to the database

"I'm not going to say it's a good thing or a bad thing," says Elizabeth Kleinfeld, assistant professor of English at Metropolitan State College of Denver. "But it's a thing for sure, and we have to deal with it in our classrooms, in our workplaces and in our relationships."

Her research indicates that students have a troubling tendency not to read deeply, though she's quick to add that there's no evidence that previous generations fared any better.

Mastering the technical aspects of multimedia tools is essential.

Perhaps most important, the breadth of information that flows from Internet search engines requires that students cultivate a discerning eye.

"I think there should be very much a conscious, strategic moving back and forth between rapid locating (of information) and deep reading."

"The Internet offers incredible opportunities to build high-level, deep thinkers if we provide the instruction that's needed."

New literacies aren't about displacing mainstream standards

"If you choose to see (new literacies) as dumbing down, you're going to see lots of evidence of that," Knobel says. "But if you choose to see it as something new and opening up all sorts of opportunities for young people to really think about media, how truth itself is often up for grabs, then there are all sorts of ways of understanding it."