Creating Future-Ready Learners

        Technology is undoubtedly a prevalent part of our daily life. It plays vital roles in every aspect of life such as jobs, education, and leisure. We rely on technology to complete many tasks and communicate various information. The 21st-century world of today is far different from the world of yesterday. There have been rapid advancements in technology that have catapulted our modern-day society into another realm where technological future-ready skills are a must. This is a skill set that 21st-century people must acquire in order to be successful in this technology-dominated world. Without this skill set, one will struggle to keep up with the demand of utilizing technology efficiently and effectively.

In order to acquire a future-ready skill set, our current educational system must undertake a drastic shift and change. The current education is stuck in traditional systems of the past. Such as classroom environments that have not changed for hundreds of years. One where students are stuck to individual desks and where the teacher is stagnant at the front of the room. The class is teacher-led where they are for the most part the bearer of all knowledge. In this setup and format, future-ready skills are not at the forefront. Teachers and students must be in an environment that fosters collaboration and meaningful interactions through the use of technology. As these are part of future skills that they will need in order to be successful.

The most crucial area in which learners must develop future-ready skills is in being productive digital citizens. They must acquire the digital literacy skills that they need to be successful in a technology-dominated world. Learners need to have strong skills in the utilization of various hardware and software. They must be able to use multiple programs to complete tasks such as google applications and Microsoft office. As well as knowing how to collaborate and communicate within online networks. They’ll need to communicate via emails, live web meetings, multimedia presentations, etc. They will need these strong skills as they go on their educational journey as there will continue to be rapid growth in technology. But there are several technologies that any observer who looks carefully can foresee today as being absolutely necessary for our students to learn. Unfortunately, very few educators are focusing on these. But we all should be (Prensky, 2012).

The challenge is how to get education to shift into the wave of the future where they are preparing learners with strong technical skills. The development of future-ready policy visions is a pressing need to meet the many challenges and opportunities arising from rapid technological change (Zagami, 2018).  There needs to be change within current schools where gaining content subject knowledge seems to be the main focus as has always been. It is still crucial for learners to acquire content knowledge such as mathematics, reading and language arts, science, and social studies material. But most schools are not implementing a future-ready mindset where they are exposing learners to 21st-century skills in preparation for their future. Learning future-ready skills is not one sole class or program a learner can take and somehow in the end know everything necessary once completing it.

Becoming future-ready must begin at a young age when educational systems focus on buffing functional digital skills, then gradually year by year move to acquire more advanced skills as learners grow in age. It is vital that schools adopt and implement new policies to establish change within their systems. Educational systems no longer have the luxury of decades of deliberation and consideration of policy reform, and policy development must embrace the use of technology to automate and augment policies at the rate and complexity required to be responsive to the needs of students and educators  (Zagami, 2018). Once these systems begin to be reformed and shift into a future-ready mindset, then schools will create the learners of tomorrow. 

Take a look at a Future-Ready example...

References

 Prensky, M. 2012. Teaching the Right Stuff Not yesterday’s stuff or today’s—but tomorrow’s! Educational Technology May-June 2012.

Zagami, J., Bocconi, S., Starkey, L., Wilson, J. D., Gibson, D., Downie, J., ... & Elliott, S. (2018). Creating future-ready information technology policy for national education systems. Technology, knowledge and learning, 23, 495-506.