A skills gap challenges educators and policymakers alike. To help meet the economic and educational needs for the modern workplace, Congress recently reauthorized the Perkins Act. The bill, "Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act," emphasizes an important mission of education in the 21st century, that is,…

Australia's overall performance in the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) ranges from average to very good. However, three million adults, representing one-fifth of the working age population, have low literacy and/or numeracy skills. Building Skills for All in Australia describes the characteristics of the low-skilled and discusses the consequences…

Put simply, "Teaching our students so that they become well-equipped with the 21st century skills is the new learning paradigm" (Kivunja, 2014b, p. 85). These skills fall into four domains which the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) identify as the Traditional Core Skills, the Learning and Innovation Skills, the Career and Life…

This paper was presented at the Australian Federation of Travel Agents Industry Leaders & Educators Engagement Symposium held in Sydney on February 12, 2015. With industry sustainability becoming a strong concern, even within growth sectors, this paper identifies issues to be considered in ensuring that the education and training system can…

The "OECD Skills Studies" series aims to provide a strategic approach to skills policies. It presents OECD internationally comparable indicators and policy analysis covering issues such as: quality of education and curricula; transitions from school to work; vocational education and training (VET); employment and unemployment; innovative…

There is increasing evidence that the lack of access to information and communication technology (ICT) or the "digital divide" severely limits education, employment and economic prospects. This paper reports on the evaluation of a project that aims to bridge the digital divide. In particular, the case study data has been used to bring to…

The Teaching Teachers to the Future project provided an opportunity to try a new idea within the ICT and Pedagogy methods subject of the Bachelor of Education program. We believed that deliberately helping pre-service teachers transition from being an online learners to online teachers, coaches and facilitators would assist these new teachers to…

The world in which teachers are working is one, thanks to collaborative technologies, in which high levels of interactions among colleagues and the wider educational community can be facilitated. The question, then, is about how to prepare new entrants to the profession to be effectively engaged in this professional reality. In this paper, we…

ICT integration of teacher preparation programmes was undertaken by the Australian Teaching Teachers for the Future (TTF) project in all 39 Australian teacher education institutions and highlighted the need for guidelines to inform systemic ICT integration approaches. A Social Ecological Model (SEM) was used to positively inform integration…

The La Trobe University iteration of the Teaching Teachers for the Future (TTF) project focused initially on subject in the second semester, third year of the Bachelor of Education course called the Multi-Disciplinary Science & Technology Integrated Experience (MSTIE). Two pairs of pre-service teachers were placed in the school where the TTF…

In this increasingly convergent and digital world, young people are reportedly using new media with high engagement outside school, yet disengaged in those schools where technology access is low or restricted. Such an apparent disconnection is magnified when predictions of their futures are tied to requisites including technological expertise,…

Research has shown that girls do not participate as much as boys in Information Technology (IT) in the senior years of high school. Despite research in the 1990s which identified the under-representation of girls in IT, the same pattern still continues. In addition, the complex reasons for this gender divide, and how to counter it, remain unclear.…

Research has established young children's increasing use of computers and other new technologies in the home. Yet, teaching about digital texts and digital practices most often appears as an addition to early literacy instruction in classrooms where "business-as-usual" maintains an emphasis on print and print-based texts. This article…

Classroom teachers routinely make judgments on the quality of their students' work based on their recognition of how effectively the student has assembled key features of the genre or the medium. Yet how readily can teachers talk about the features of student-created multimodal texts in ways that can improve learning and performance? This article…

Australia's national educational goals place considerable importance on the place of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education. The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians of December 2008 asserted that "in this digital age young people need to be highly skilled in the use of ICT" (MCEETYA,…