What Year are we Preparing our students for?

An excellent and thought provoking question posed at TEDxNYED last month by Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Executive Director of the Curriculum Mapping Institute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsUgj9_ltN8

TED talks are short by design, this one is about 16 minutes long and worth watching. Some of her statements:

• Most schools are preparing kids for 1991.
• We have a new type of learner, we need a new type of classroom.
• We can do dumb things with a Smartboard.
• We need new forms of school.

She argues for "upgrades," strategic replacements of "dated content, skills, and assessments." But the perquisite will be the development of rubrics for assessing blogs, podcasts, wikis, and other digital media.