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Ever wonder why you can’t figure out when and where to stick a comma?

Technology is the driving force behind most of the education innovation. It is impacting not only what we can do as educators, but it is also changing how we approach learning. These innovations may have not all reached the education journals yet, but they have been presented and are being discussed digitally and at great length in social media.

Information from technology may be easily accessed, but it is not yet a passive exercise. It requires effort and an ability to learn and adapt. These are skills that all educators have, but many may not always be willing to use. The status quo has not required educators to use these skills in a long time. Using these skills requires effort and leaving a long-standing zone of comfort in order to learn and use new methods of information retrieval.

They need to be the life-long learners that they want their students to be.

Perhaps more important than the content we teach are the life skills we model by embracing these ­concepts. Using social media in the classroom allows teachers to remind students of the power their words can have online. This understanding will be crucial as they head to ­college, start a career and become adults in a ­digital world.

education is falling behind the curve,1 as it did during the rapid changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution.

The last major changes to cur­riculum2 were effected in the late 1800s as a response to the sudden growth in societal and human capital needs

Having students develop deep knowledge is as essential as ever. But today, we must also make that knowledge relevant.

One thing we have learned in the last 20 years is that many young people — certainly most teens– are pretty savvy about how they use the Net, though all of us can use some reminders now and then.

And parents — even those who may be technologically challenged — continue to have a crucial role to play in guiding their children and helping them sort out and deal with the stresses of life, both online and offline.

A better strategy would be to teach children to be “street smart” in order to better safeguard themselves in any potentially uncomfortable or dangerous situation.

Society has changed. We cannot adequately prepare students for the society that exists today or will exist tomorrow, if we continue to prepare them for the society that existed yesterday. In order to prepare students to play their role in the 21st century society we are a part of, a few things need to be considered when deciding how education will look in our schools and classrooms.

Building a professional Learning Network consisting of quality educators, who responsibly share quality information and sources, takes time and requires a plan. It is my belief that the people you follow are far more important than those who follow you.

How do you find those quality educators to follow in order to add value to your PLN?

Back in 1999, when there were still a few people muttering that the Internet was “just a fad”, the science fiction writer and visionary Douglas Adams wrote an article expressing amusement at the way the mainstream media considered the Internet something odd, and slightly sinister: …you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this: 1) Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 2) Anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3) Anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really. (Adams, 1999)

The last 15 Web-frenzied years have upended the basic premise of school. The idea that content and knowledge and teachers are scarce and have to be collected into a local classroom during a certain time period in order to educate our children is no longer true.

In order to deepen and enhance the learning in these three dimensions — Knowledge, Skills, and Character qualities–there is an important additional fourth dimension needed for a fully comprehensive twenty-first century education: Meta-Learning (often called learning to learn–the internal processes by which we reflect on and adapt our learning).

As much as some people may yearn for the simpler times of the past, life will continue to move forward as the natural order of society requires.

If we do not take time to understand new information and how it interacts with what we do, we, as a profession, may go the way of typewriters, photographic film, super 8 film, 8 track cassettes, landline telephones, or block-ice refrigeration.

Staying up-to-date, relevant, on information in your own profession is a moral imperative. We can’t expect what we learned as college students to carry us through a 30 or 40-year career.