The workforce has changed. We now live in an information society where the top jobs require skills like critical thinking, communication and the ability to collaborate as a team. Schools are beginning to reflect this change as well. The “Three Rs” (reading, writing and arithmetic) are no longer enough. Educators need to focus on what the National Education Association refers to as the “Four Cs”: critical thinking, collaboration, creativity and communication.

Students must learn to sift through and evaluate information, a skill that will also prove essential in their college career. Accessing information is easier than ever and if students don’t learn to pick and choose the most credible sources and the most pertinent content they’ll get lost or overwhelmed by the amount of information at their fingertips. They also need to develop collaboration skills. Today’s workers complete very few tasks alone and work isn’t confined to an office, it’s global. Technology facilitates teamwork in a way that was unimaginable for previous generations. Videoconferencing and cloud-based tools make collaboration easier than ever. This is one reason why collaboration was a major theme behind the Passaic City School’s 1:1 Chromebook initiative.

“The workforce demands these skills,” says Joshua Koen, director of Information Technology for Passaic. “Collaboration was one of those four 21st century workforce skills identified between 1996-2001 by a report by a number of businesses for the CEO forum on workforce skills. Technology facilitates a fair amount of that workflow and that interest.”

Passaic teachers are using collaborative classroom notes as way to instill 21st workforce skills in their students. Instead of everyone taking notes in class, students are responsible on a rotating basis for taking those notes in a document that is available online. Everyone has a vested interest in the accuracy of the information because it is a single document from which everyone has to work.

In the second installment of our Tech Chat series, Koen explains why collaborative learning is important and discusses some of the ways Passaic is encouraging its own collaborative classrooms.