Last month I received an email from someone at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Palo Alto, CA that contracts with companies to forecast future trends. In their email to me they said they were working for a major handset manufacturer (i.e. cell phone maker) to, as they put it, “undercover leading edge behaviors and tech enablers that will help inform and shape their future products and services.” Apparently they had been following my classroom audio updates on www.mrtalmadge.com after reading a blog post about my use of Cinch, a podcast by phone service that I used last year. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was listening to Marketplace on the radio when I heard an interview with Marina Gorbis, executive director of IFTF on a series that Marketplace was doing about “Jobs of the Future”. Isn’t it funny how something you’ve never heard of can pop into your life multiple times like that within a short period of time? Anyhow, you can listen to the story here, but I was struck by the fact that, according to Gorbis and other future job experts, the skills our workers will need are predicted to be more creative, higher order thinking kinds of skills. That got me thinking, how are teachers in classrooms providing students with the kinds of experiences that teach these skills? In what way can teachers leverage technology to help teach these 21st century skills? And too, when I was in the classroom, was I providing student with expereinces that would help them gain the necessary skills for the future job market? The report went on to say:
“That's why Gorbis says emphasize creative problem-solving. Schools can teach it; it's usually done in group exercises. They can take a lot of class time, but Gorbis says creative problem-solving is a key to innovation, and a necessary skill in a lot of the new jobs created by all those smart machines that are destroying some old jobs.”
Ultimately, if and when I make it back to the classroom, I have no choice but to do a better job designing lessons and activities that force students to work together, utilize technology and be more creative in the process.
I'm in the process of getting approved to teach a class on how to program "apps" for iPhone/iPod/iPad. It will be a computer programming course (Objective C), but I think it will have enough general appeal to get a wide variety of kids interested. I'm hoping that kids who would never sign up for a "Computer Science" course might jump at the chance to build their own apps.Programming this type of application requires the skill sets you described: creative problem solving and higher order thinking on the programming end, lots of creativity and even artistic work on the planning and interface portions.I've always thought of my field as the "fun" classes as opposed to the serious work students do in other classes. But really, this stuff is quite valuable and will continue to be valuable for the foreseeable future.
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