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teachers are increasingly removed from dealing with children as part of a broader historical, social and cultural context.

Removed from the normative and pedagogical framing of classroom life, teachers no longer have the option to think outside of the box, to experiment, be poetic or inspire joy in their students. School has become a form of dead time, designed to kill the imagination of both teachers and students

Under this bill, the quality of teaching and the worth of a teacher are solely determined by student test scores on standardized tests.

Moreover, advanced degrees and professional credentials would now become meaningless in determining a teacher's salary.

In other words, teaching was always directive in its attempt to shape students as particular agents and offer them a particular understanding of the present and the future.

Rather than viewed as disinterested technicians, teachers should be viewed as engaged intellectuals, willing to construct the classroom conditions that provide the knowledge, skills and culture of questioning necessary for students to participate in critical dialogue with the past, question authority, struggle with ongoing relations of power and prepare themselves for what it means to be active and engaged citizens in the interrelated local, national and global public spheres.

fosters rather than mandates

respects the time and conditions teachers need to prepare lessons, research, cooperate with each other and engage valuable community resources.

In part, this requires pedagogical practices that connect the space of language, culture and identity to their deployment in larger physical and social spaces. Such pedagogical practices are based on the presupposition that it is not enough to teach students how to read the word and knowledge critically. They most also learn how to act on their beliefs, reflect on their role as engaged citizens and intervene in the world as part of the obligation of what it means to be a socially responsible agent.

As the late Pierre Bourdieu argued, the "power of the dominant order is not just economic, but intellectual - lying in the realm of beliefs," and it is precisely within the domain of ideas that a sense of utopian possibility can be restored to the public realm

Supporting or learners and staff to use collaborative digital environments and tools in safe, critical and innovative ways should be on the top of all our digital literacy wish lists and informing local and national policy and practice.

We need to be mindful that a great deal of current research highlights correlations between socio economic status and access.

But supporting all of our children and young people’s ability to have meaningful, useful and safe online interactions means that we don’t further disadvantage some of our most vulnerable populations.

It turns out what people most want to know about their friends isn't how they imagine themselves to be, but what it is they are actually getting up to and thinking about

Recent research has clearly underlined the need to address children’s and young people’s use of the internet, mobile and games technologies in the context of digital literacy.

The report points up young people’s largely pedestrian use of technology, and highlights the role that educators could and should be playing in supporting young peoples engagement as producers, creators, curators rather than primarily as consumers:

There are many definitions of digital literacy. In one of the earliest (2006), Allan Martin defined Digital Literacy as “…the awareness, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital tools and facilities to identify, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, analyse and synthesise digital resources, construct new knowledge, create media expressions, and communicate with others in the context of specific life situations, in order to enable constructive social action; and to reflect upon this process.” 

The characteristics across many of the available definitions are that digital literacy are that: it supports and helps develop traditional literacies – it isn’t about the use of technology for it’s own sake or ICT as an isolated practice it's a life long practice – developing and continuing to maintain skills in the context of continual development of technologies and practices it's about skills and competencies, and critical reflection on how these skills and competencies are applied it's about social engagement – collaboration, communication, and creation within social contexts

As bandwidth improves, a number of startups are offering web-based live training.

How do you make education affordable?

but much more innovation is needed.