{"id":349,"date":"2007-08-04T22:59:38","date_gmt":"2007-08-05T03:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/2007\/08\/04\/tough-choices-or-tough-times\/"},"modified":"2007-08-04T22:59:38","modified_gmt":"2007-08-05T03:59:38","slug":"tough-choices-or-tough-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/2007\/08\/04\/tough-choices-or-tough-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Tough Choices or Tough Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I read several articles about this paper<\/a> from \u00a0the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce<\/a>.\u00a0 A PowerPoint is here<\/a>.\u00a0 This reports says that the American\u00a0standard of living\u00a0is going to take a nasty\u00a0dive if we cannot increase the number of people working in “creative” fields.\u00a0 The chart below shows the three types of work defined by the report.<\/p>\n

\"creativework.png\"<\/p>\n

The areas\u00a0are routine work done by people.\u00a0 Routine work done by machines.\u00a0 And finally, creative work.\u00a0 Notice the triangle is split near the bottom of the creative diamond.\u00a0 Only the top portion of the graph will be work done in the United States.\u00a0 Almost all routine work will be\u00a0completed in less developed countries.<\/p>\n

Education (part of the creative diamond) will need to change drastically.\u00a0 The commission recommends we begin to recruit teachers from the top third of all graduates.\u00a0 Create an incentive for these students to go into education by offering a six-digit pay scale for the best teachers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

We need to train students to solve problems.\u00a0 One of the key points in the PowerPoint explains that our students must be creative, innovative and able to learn new things quickly.\u00a0 That last point is a tough one.\u00a0 It is one I stress in my classes all the time.\u00a0 Being involved in technology requires me to continually learn new things because I have to teach them.\u00a0 All educators need to do the same.<\/p>\n

There was a time when the first computer course\u00a0every educator\u00a0took was programming in BASIC<\/a>.\u00a0 The computers we had in our classrooms didn’t do much more than BASIC.\u00a0 I remember when\u00a0Hypercard<\/a> was the topic everyone needed to learn in education.\u00a0 Now very few of my students have heard of the program.\u00a0 In the mid-90’s we learned HTML.\u00a0 At the start of the 21st century video editing was hot.\u00a0 Now we have to manage web 2.0 applications.\u00a0 Somewhere in there all our presentations switched to PowerPoint and we started taking all our pictures with digital cameras.<\/p>\n

Students graduating from high school last spring had Microsoft Office available to them from kindergarten through twelfth grade.\u00a0 Most of them will take a course in college that introduces them to this same set of tools.\u00a0 Change takes time in education.\u00a0 We need to speed things up if we want to stay ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I read several articles about this paper from \u00a0the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce.\u00a0 A PowerPoint is here.\u00a0 This reports says that the American\u00a0standard of living\u00a0is going to take a nasty\u00a0dive if we cannot … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[336,2],"class_list":["post-349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edtech","tag-edtech","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}