:: The 4th Era ::

The shift from time to learning changes everything. Most obviously it changes how students move through an education system and earn credentials.

But it also changes how learning opportunities are structured and supported by educators. It can change structures, staffing, schedules, and support systems. It changes the whole vocabulary of learning.

The integration of technology in learning is not new. In the 1980s, many schools had fancy calculators, Macintosh computers, and were even teaching students basic coding.

This kind of integration often happened at the lesson or activity level, meaning that it was often surface-level, tacked-on, and perhaps a bit superficial.

The power of technology is difficult to fully leverage without curriculum-level integration. This means choosing tools, platforms, and policies based on standards, assessment, and instruction. A side benefit to this approach is the possibility of teacher collaboration and “same-pageness.”

"The modern learner has to sift through a lot of information.

That means higher level thinking skills like analysis and evaluation are necessary just to reduce all the noise and establish the credibility of information.

"There is also the matter of utility. Evaluating information depends as much on context and circumstance as it does the nature of the data itself. The essay full of fluff may distill quite nicely down to a 140 character tweet. A trivial fact about governments may appear useless in a research paper on the 3 branches of government, but could find utility in a project-based learning artifact on the evolution of government systems worldwide."