I’m 21 C R U?

Written by: Danielle Abernethy
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

This weekend at the Palm Beach County Technology Conference and the Forsyth County Digital Schoolhouse Conference I asked a question during my session, “What does it mean to be a 21st Century Learner?” I asked for the participants in the workshops to describe the learner, their skills and their tools. Here are a few of their answers:

A 21st Century Learner has good communication and collaboration skills, globally and regionally informed, able to share, self-starters and multi-taskers. 21st Century learners have the skills to think critically, use technology, be creative in their thinking, and also to be innovative in their thinking. Tools for a 21st Century learner include cell phones, iPod, computers, interactive white boards, video conferencing, digital cameras and anything else technology related.

But what about netTrekker d.i. itself? Is it 21st Century? I have often had teachers ask me that, and I want to share with you my reasons for it being a loud resounding YES on tools for 21st Century.

1.    Our students are not just English speaking students. We have students from various countries in our classrooms, and hopefully students who are learning other languages in our schools. netTrekker d.i. has resources in 15 different languages, easily discovered with our refinement menu or advanced searches.
2.    Unfortunately not all of our students are on the same reading levels, and so we have to be able to find resources to fit their needs. With the readability levels in netTrekker d.i. you can easily find resources for your mixed ability level classrooms.
3.    Again, not all of our students are on the same reading levels, and we have some great tools to help them with reading. My personal favorite is the Read Aloud tool. You can have a student, like my child, who is a non-reader suddenly enabled with this tool. This helps leveling the playing field and enables all students to be a self-starter.
4.    By being able to refine your search to find games and interactive media, you are able to easily find the sites that encourage innovative, creative, and critical thinking. Learning does not have to be flat with sites that are straight information. 21st Century learning can be (and should be) engaging, especially with netTrekker d.i.
5.    Let’s go back to our students from all over the world or studying a variety of languages and include our students without the greatest vocabulary skills. If they come across a word they don’t know, what do they do? Most of the time they either ignore it or give up right? Well if they use the Dictionary Hot Key, they can click on the word and get the definition. And if needed, they can have the word translated to another language. Those who are studying a foreign language and are trying to read a website in that language can also translate an unknown word to English. Becoming comfortable with other languages sure does help with communication.

So there you have it, my first five (of ten) reasons on why netTrekker d.i. is a 21st Century tool and should be used in schools everywhere. netTrekker d.i. is a time-saver by only finding resources aligned to state standards that are appropriate for education, with built in tools, refinement menu and other features that help our 21st Century learners find the resources they need for learning without losing valuable time trying to weed out the erroneous information.

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Tags: 21st Century, dictionary, Forsyth County, netTrekker, Palm Beach, read aloud, readability