Chris Betcher’s regular podcast The Virtual Staffroom has a new episode that went up yesterday all about Information Literacy.  He interviews a teacher librarian on the subject, raising and discussing some of the challenges of learning in the 21st Century and how to locate, select and critique information.

It is long for those not used to listening to podcasts, but it is good (in fact, I’m listening to it as I type).  I recommend you listen to it.  The link to the podcast is below, or if you’re an iTunes user, you can access/subscribe to the Virtual Staffroom through the iTunes store.  I’ve also added a link to the podcast in our staff del.icio.us account.

The Virtual Staffroom Episode 14: Questions are the Answer

Firstly, here’s the NSWDET site on the newly updated information skills process.

Secondly, if you’d like to see your children use search engines more effectively and critically, you can download these posters and cards for display in your classroom, courtesy of Google.

Finally, if you’re still not convinced about the need to develop students’ information literacy, then you must watch this video from teachers.tv.

Of course, this week’s staff meeting is CENet part II.  We’ll get back to the HSIE conversation and journey next week.

Some people may remember that Dale Spender was a presenter at the 2003 Diocesan Focus on Learning Conference.  Last week she contributed her thoughts on federal political education policies and their relevance to the 21st Century world our schools need to prepare children for.  I was alerted to this Sydney Morning Herald article by the Diocesan Library blog, Edlib.

As we approach a federal election this year, the party leaders are talking about “vision” and “the future”.  We as educators need to pay attention to and critique the education policies to see how visionary they really are.

As learned professionals we need to make informed and objective choices.  ABC’s Stateline on Saturday reported on the NSW State Government’s disagreement with recently announced Federal Government policy.  While the Iemma Government is opposed to performance pay for teachers, it also sought to criticise levels of Federal funding for government schools vs. non-government schools (always a touchy subject for those in Catholic Education, but not one for discussing in this forum – I’ll use a personal space to express my personal opinion), presenting the data in a way supportive of their own perspective.  “There are three types of lies – lies, damn lies, and…”

For those people interested in learning more about the education policies in the lead-up to the federal election, below are links to the policies of the two major parties:

• Australian Labor Party
• The Liberal Party of Australia doesn’t have a dedicated policies page yet for the current election, but read the news on the home page and in the archive for the latest policy announcements

Or has it? Yes, I must admit that even in my own class I get frustrated when a child in Term 1 asks me if they can print work, only to have my affirmative response followed by another question: “How do I do that?” But we’ve known for a long time at St. Michael’s that the focus with our classroom computers is integration into classroom learning, not about how to use a computer. That comes with the classroom learning that has the technology well-integrated into it.

So we have our computer skills. But the Web 2.0 world we live in demands more. Rather, it doesn’t demand more, but it does demand a re-prioritisation. Many children now come to school familiar with their computers. What they don’t know will come with further use and their own desire to do more with the tools they have (given of course an encouraging environment to use them).

For the 21st Century learner, the most important computer skill is not about operating the hardware, but about managing the information that hardware opens up the gates to.

Take, for example, these statistics that I’m taking off the net as I type:

• Searching Google for st. michael’s primary school blacktown south brings up 43 200 results
• YouTube serves 100 million videos per day
• Last year Reuters released more than 2.5 million news items, which would have all been posted on its websites.

To manage this ever-growing world of information, our children need to be critical users of the Internet and have the information skills necessary to utilise the information they want and need effectively.

I suggest that teaching our children Information Skills and about Critical and Visual Literacies is more important than teaching them how to apply a template to a slide in PowerPoint, or finding where the eraser tool is in KidPix.

Hopefully Judy and I (and perhaps some others on our team) can share a bit more this year about how crucial it is for our students to be information literate as the first and foremost “technology skill”.