21st Century Skills Addressing Students' and Teachers' Needs Date:   Monday , April 01, 2013 InOpen Technologies is an educational startup with a focus on developing quality academic content through intense research. The Mumbai based company has received a funding of $500,000 from VenturEast. The 21st century skills consist of four Cs – critical thinking skills, collaboration, communication and creativity. Most education boards across countries have recognized the importance of 21st century skills ever since it was proposed by UNESCO. There is an abundance of literature available that emphasizes how to inculcate these skills in students. However, there is a dearth of instruction material that is adapted to the needs of Indian students to address the 21st century skills. We developed one such content that teaches computers and at the same time builds these skills. In addition, it addresses the needs of teachers as well, because they are the delivery channels of the content. We would like to stress that unless the requirements of the teachers are addressed, the content delivery will not be effective. There is a felt need for an appropriate teacher training programme. We describe the teacher training program – topics covered, instruction strategies used. Besides, we also present empirical data on participant teachers’ feedback and knowledge gained. In India, NCERT is the central governing body for school education and most state boards borrow cues from what it prescribes. The National Curriculum Framework (2005) elaborates on how ICT education program is suited for life skills education. It also mentions that there is a felt gap for an appropriate and standard curriculum, unavailability of trained teachers and dearth of content that addresses students’ education needs. Keeping in line with this view, we developed instruction material called Computer Masti (CM). These instruction material addresses the 21st century skills in the following manner: (a) Critical Thinking skills: Critical thinking skills is portrayed by knowledge and thinking process which brings clarity of thought amongst students. Explicit teaching of step wise thinking, logical reasoning, gathering information systematically, and multiple representations are included. These are applied not just in using computer applications, but real life situations and aims to develop generalizable thinking skill set. (b) Collaboration as a skill is presented through group activities that facilitate knowledge sharing and hence nurtures team work abilities amongst students. (c) Communication as a skill is presented by the use of modern day communication tools which acts as a media between individuals and groups. Some of these communication tools include multimedia presentation and e-mail. (d) Creativity as a 21st century skill is nurtured in CM by including activities such as digital story-telling, multimedia programming that allows students to go beyond the book and apply to a wider skill set. If we want the students to be equipped with the 21st century skills when they graduate out of schools, we need to invest our resources in teacher training as well. Teachers have to be given not just content on what to teach, but also training on how to teach effectively. Computer teachers typically come with a technical skill set, but lack pedagogy skills. Sometimes, the situation is even more challenging since the traditional teaching style needs to alter and this requires recognizing stereotypes of teachers, disputing these, unlearning some practices, learning modern teaching strategies (e.g. Webquest, Jigsaw, multimedia scrapbook). To overcome this challenge, strategies that we want the teacher to use in the class to facilitate nurturing of 21st century skills are also used during the training. This ensures that the teacher has a first-hand experience of using these strategies and its impact.