What are the critical literacy skills of today and tomorrow?

After reading New times, new literacies. (Education Queensland, 2004) I believe there are three top questions/ issues that educators need to address:
1. Define which are the critical literacy skills that are essential for the 21st century learners and explore ways of how they could be integrated effectively within the current curriculum.

2. Craft strategies to effectively address the diversity and disparity of literacy levels in an ever changing and increasingly diverse culturally and socially global community of learners.

3. There is an emerging technological literacy become increasingly important to master. This literacy is about the ability to understand and effectively use emerging and converging technologies in different situations and contexts and solve effectively problems. The burning question is: How we address that critical iteracy in the current curriculum if it is not present amongst the educators themselves?

The questions raised in the article were mainly around the literacy practices that students engage in which are very important to be aware of and understand. Of equal importance I believe is also knowing and understanding the literacy practices that educators engage with to be able to offer them with training and development opportunities that will effectively address lower level or lacking literacies that they need to develop or improve on in order to be able to be support their learners in developing such literacies themselves .

Presentation Files

The power point presentations from the symposia are avaliable from the AKO Site (http://akoaotearoa.ac.nz/communities/e-learning-education-and-training).

Please let me know if you have issues obtaining the files.

John

Hamilton Symposia

The last Symposia was held in Hamilton on Thursday and was well attended. It was great to be part of the lively discussions and to hear of the exciting developments planned.

West Coast Symposium

Richard and Sue had a great time on the West Coast (Including Whitebait Fritters and Monteiths :)) Thnak you Barbara for pulling this together. You did a great job

Southland Symposia

Terry and Sue had a great time at Invercargill and really enjoyed the active engagement of all participants.

Thank you Teri for all your efforts on this

John

Northland Symposia

The Northland symposia has just been held and participant feedback was very positive.

Thank you to Vasi and her team for all the efforts, really enjoyed the day

Covering the distance

Haast and back again. Absolutely beautful weather.
Satelitte connections work one way really well, the download speed exceeds all exectations, but upload is slwerthan the normal dal-up so the school cannot take part in video-conferencng.
The cell phone coverage for the area the school is in was supposed to come through June-July this year but nothing as yet.
This is not about technology fashions and playing with it, it is about sending and recieving information for education and communication.
The gap here is some of the in between technology, better send and recieve equipment, better linkages between the provider and the customer, better routers and modems.  The children are waiting, the adults are waiting and want this ability as well. It would make my job so much easier.