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Which leads to the second question which is how in god’s name can we talk seriously about 21st Century skills for kids if we’re not talking 21st Century skills for educators first? The more I listened, the less I heard in terms of how we make the teaching profession as a whole even capable of teaching these “skills” to kids.

<p>Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.</p><!--AD BEGIN--><div class="ad"> <div class="mediumRectangle"></div></div><!--AD END--><p>Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.</p>

These are the roles of a 21st Century educator: Teacher as leader, Teacher as writer, Teachers as 21st Century literacy activist.

Direct Manipulation Principle: As the complexity of the materials increases, the impact of direct manipulation (animation, pacing) of the learning materials on the transfer of knowledge also increases.

However, when the average student is engaged in higher-order thinking using multimedia in interactive situations, on average, that student's percentage ranking on higher-order or transfer skills increases by 32 percentile points over what the student would have accomplished with traditional learning.