New Century Learning

Aprender en un nuevo siglo

Our children live in a culture of YouTube, blogs, iPods, MP3s, cell phones, and the Internet. The advent of these tools has profoundly affected all aspects of life, especially, what it means to be a democratic citizen.

At BFIS, we believe technology, coupled with thoughtful instruction and supervision, will enable students to communicate, investigate, and create in contemporary modes where new literacies are essential. New literacies include:

Appropriation: the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.

Collective Intelligence: the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal.

Distributed Cognition: the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities.

Judgment: the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources.

Multitasking: the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Negotiation: the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Networking: the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information.

Play: the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem solving.

Simulation: the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes.

These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom.

Committed to learning that is driven by inquiry, problem solving, and communication, BFIS must provide the resources for students to evolve in these critical ways— as culture makers. To realize this, the schools’ infrastructure must support global learning by offering access to state-of-the-art applications and tools.
Beginning Spring 2008, the New Century Learning (NCL) initiative, a three-tier strategy of tool upgrade, professional development, and technology integration will be implemented over a three-year period. NCL will be foundational to realizing our mission of cultivating multi-literate, global citizens of the twenty-first century.