Duration: 1:17
Dr David Parsons, Associate Professor Massey University, explains the need to teach higher level thinking skills and develop key competencies using technology to prepare students for the 21st century.
We live in a world where remembering information is no longer as important as it used to be because information is at our fingertips all the time, so what we’re trying to do, I guess, is to think about, “What is it we’re trying to teach?”
If we’re not just trying to teach factual recall like we often did in the past, what are we trying to do? Well I guess we’re trying to teach higher level skills. We’re trying to teach critical thinking. We’re trying to teach synthesis, analysis. We’re trying to raise a generation that are cleverer than we are. We’re a generation who kind of screwed the world up and don’t know how to fix it and we have to hope that future generations can do a better job. So we’ve got to try and equip them with the thinking skills, with the ability to work in teams, with the ability to understand different points of view, to use every tool that they have available, to increase their power, to affect change in the world, hopefully for the better.
And so it’s those kinds of things that we’re needing to address and that’s why, you know, radical new thoughts about the way that we teach with technology, and in many other ways, is so important these days because we can’t just carry on with 20th century education in a completely different world.