Our students’ future will most likely look quite different from our past. If we want them to be successful, now and in their future, it is critical that we help them develop the skills they need. In the past the “3 R’s” were good enough (even though only one of those skills actually started with an ‘R’ - Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic). (From ControlAltAchieve.com)

For our students future they need the “4 C’s” to be successful:

• Communication
• Collaboration
• Creativity
• Critical Thinking

The 4 C’s of Education skills that our students need to be successful. These skills are:

• Communication - Sharing thoughts, questions, ideas, and solutions
  Our students need to be able to clearly communicate their thoughts through a variety of means including technology. This could include email, chatting, word processing, slideshows, video conferencing (Hangouts), and more. Our students need to share their work with a broad authentic audience beyond just their teacher and the kitchen refrigerator.

• Collaboration - Working together to reach a goal, putting talent, expertise, and smarts to work
  In the future our students will have jobs that require them to work together with a wide range of diverse people, who may not even be in the same office, state, or country. Many times this may involve collaborative technology such as Google Docs.

• Creativity - Trying new approaches to get things done equals innovation & invention
  Our students can't simply ingest the facts we give them, and then spit the same information back. They need to be creative, expressing their knowledge in a wide variety of manners including writing, design, animation, video, building, programming, and much more. Our students need to feed their creations back into the class to teach others from what they have learned.

• Critical Thinking - Looking at problems in a new way, linking learning across subjects & disciplines
  We don’t even know what challenges the future will bring, so our students need to learn to solve problems, whatever they may be. Instead of simply giving our students notes with all the answers, we need to provide them with project-based, problem-based, and inquiry-based learning, where the students examine data, look for patterns, draw conclusions, and learn for themselves.

• Appraise your teaching and tools with the 4 C’s
  Just like the 4 C’s of diamonds can be used to appraise the value of a diamond, we need to use the 4 C’s of education to evaluate the quality of our lesson plans and our technology tools. We need to ask ourselves which of the 4 C’s are getting covered in the project we have for our students or the program we want them to use.

• Apprise your students of the 4 C’s
  We need to teach our students what the 4 C’s are and give them opportunities to use them routinely in their learning.

• Apply the 4 C’s in your professional life
  And we need to lead by example. We need to practice the 4 C’s in our own professional lives. We need to collaborate with other educators around the world through Google Communities, Twitter chats, Edcamps, and more. We need to be creative in how we use technology to teach our content standards, and communicate our ideas and resources with others.

If we incorporate the 4 C’s into our students learning, that will go a long way to help them develop the skills they will need for their future. And it will help to make sure that “teacher” never joins the bowling alley pinsetters, lamplighters, and other jobs that have become obsolete.

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Email: guyonl@schuylerville.org
Website: https://sites.google.com/schuylerville.org/integrationspecialist/home
Twitter: @smilelearning