READYI NG STUDENTS FOR K-12, DIGITAL AGE

MIKKA KERI A. BALTAZAR Are our students ready to thrive in the Digital Age?

Everyone is expecting our students to be more than ready, in light of the K to 12 Program which the Department of Education and the national government had implemented recently.

Our students, under the K-12 curriculum, are expected to acquire 21st Century Skills, which are supposed to prepare them to succeed in tomorrow’s world.

Schools now should be able to keep up with rapid technology, research, and societal changes. We should ensure that our students will be ready to thrive in today’s knowledge-based, global society.

Everyone should acknowledge that 21st century skills are essential to the education of today’s learner. In light of this, schools must embrace new designs for learning based on emerging research about how people learn, effective uses of technology, and 21st century skills in the context of rigorous academic content.

Have we accepted the fact that yesterday’s education is not sufficient anymore for today’s learner? We should, as academic excellence must be acquired within the context of today’s technological environment in order to fully prepare students to thrive in the Digital Age.

Like it or not, today’s children are growing up in the Digital Age, with their view of the world very different from that of adults. This is because they now have access to information, people, and ideas across highly interactive media.

Now, what students learn, and when they learn is changing because of globalization and societal change. Research indicates that all children can excel, especially when they are immersed in meaningful, challenging work (Newmann et al., 2001).

In our mission to transform our students amidst the Digital Age, they should be equipped with basic, scientific, economic, and technological literacy as well as visual and information literacy. They should also acquire multicultural literacy and global awareness, inventive thinking, adaptability and managing complexity, self-direction, Curiosity, creativity, and risk taking, and higherorder thinking and sound reasoning.

For effective communication, they must learn about teaming, collaboration, and interpersonal skills; personal, social, and civic responsibility; and interactive communication.

High productivity is also a must: prioritizing, planning, and managing for results; effective use of real-world tools; and ability to produce relevant, highquality products.