¿Qué es lo que merece la pena aprender? es una pregunta imposible, si lo que buscamos es la respuesta perfecta. Pero, meditando bien los criterios y con la sensación de tener una misión valiosa que llevar a cabo, podemos buscar respuestas interesantes con inteligencia.Visualizar lo que podría tener un valor dentro de los contenidos que enseñamos en las escuelas es, sin duda, un acto fundamental de imaginación educativa. Hasta ahora, siempre nos hemos centrado en educar para lo conocido. Sin embargo, apostar por que el mañana se parecerá al ayer no parece muy adecuado. Necesitamos un programa más audaz. Llamémoslo educar para lo desconocido que, lejos de ser una paradoja inabordable, puede resultar atractivo y estimulante.Lograrlo pasa, según David Perkins, por identificar grandes temas de comprensión, grandes preguntas y grandes destrezas, entendiendo grande como esencial, aquello que nos capacita ampliamente durante toda la vida para desenvolvernos bien ante cualquier situación. ¿Puede esta visión darnos quizá la esperanza de que, a través de la educación, podemos acceder a lo desconocido, abordar sus giros e imprevistos, y situarnos en el camino hacia la sabiduría?

Three essays by Marc Prensky

Discover why and how schools must become places where thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted As educators, parents, and citizens, we must settle for nothing less than environments that bring out the best in people, take learning to the next level, allow for great discoveries, and propel both the individual and the group forward into a lifetime of learning. This is something all teachers want and all students deserve. In Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools, Ron Ritchhart, author of Making Thinking Visible, explains how creating a culture of thinking is more important to learning than any particular curriculum and he outlines how any school or teacher can accomplish this by leveraging 8 cultural forces: expectations, language, time, modeling, opportunities, routines, interactions, and environment. With the techniques and rich classroom vignettes throughout this book, Ritchhart shows that creating a culture of thinking is not about just adhering to a particular set of practices or a general expectation that people should be involved in thinking. A culture of thinking produces the feelings, energy, and even joy that can propel learning forward and motivate us to do what at times can be hard and challenging mental work.

Students today are growing up in a digital world. These "digital natives" learn in new and different ways, so educators need new approaches to make learning both real and relevant for today's students. Marc Prensky, who first coined the terms "digital natives" and "digital immigrants," presents an intuitive yet highly innovative and field-tested partnership model that promotes 21st-century student learning through technology. Partnership pedagogy is a framework in which: - Digitally literate students specialize in content finding, analysis, and presentation via multiple media - Teachers specialize in guiding student learning, providing questions and context, designing instruction, and assessing quality - Administrators support, organize, and facilitate the process schoolwide - Technology becomes a tool that students use for learning essential skills and "getting things done" With numerous strategies, how-to's, partnering tips, and examples, Teaching Digital Natives is a visionary yet practical book for preparing students to live and work in today's globalized and digitalized world.

In his most visionary book, internationally renowned educator Marc Prensky presents a compelling alternative to how and what we teach our children. Drawing on emerging world trends, he elaborates a comprehensive vision for K–12 education that includes new goals, new means, a new curriculum, a new kind of teaching, and a new use of technology. “Marc Prensky—one of the smartest people working in educational reform today—offers us a lucid, inspiring, optimistic, doable, and crucial blueprint for how we can build a future with the schools children desperately need in our modern, high-risk, highly complex, fast-changing, and imperiled world.” —James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Regents’ Professor, Arizona State University “Marc Prensky was always ahead of his time. Education to better their world continues this trend in spades. This book is a goldmine and a powerful wakeup call that the future is already here—in pockets right now but a harbinger of what is rapidly emerging. Read the book and make yourself part of the future today. As we are finding in our own work, students are agents of change—in pedagogy, in learning environments, and of society itself. Exciting possibilities await!” —Michael Fullan, Professor Emeritus, OISE/University of Toronto “Marc Prensky’s answer to the question ‘What is the purpose of education?’—that education should now empower youth to improve their communities and the world—would unleash the energy, creativity, and compassion of students and teachers in ways we have never imagined. We need the better world Prensky envisions and we need it now.” —Milton Chen, The George Lucas Educational Foundation “Prensky offers perhaps the most compelling case and model yet articulated by anyone for today’s globally-empowered children. A must-read book for all educators and anyone who cares about education.” —James Tracey, Head of School, Rocky Hill School, RI “Wow. As a takeaway it is good—very good.” —John Seeley Brown “A great book. Filled with ‘food for thought’, common sense, provocative ideas and fun to read.” —Nieves Segovia, Presidenta, Institucion Educativa SEK (SEK International Schools)

This Child-Friendly Schools (CFS) Manual was developed during three-and-a-half years of continuous work, involving the United Nations Children's Fund education staff and specialists from partner agencies working on quality education. It benefits from fieldwork in 155 countries and territories, evaluations carried out by the Regional Offices and desk reviews conducted by headquarters in New York. The manual is a part of a total resource package that includes an e-learning package for capacity-building in the use of CFS models and a collection of field case studies to illustrate the state of the art in child-friendly schools in a variety of settings.

A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish has been fully revised and updated, including over 500 new entries, making it an invaluable resource for students of Spanish. Based on a new web-based corpus containing more than 2 billion words collected from 21 Spanish-speaking countries, the second edition of A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish provides the most expansive and up-to-date guidelines on Spanish vocabulary. Each entry is accompanied with an illustrative example and full English translation. The Dictionary provides a rich resource for language teaching and curriculum design, while a separate CD version provides the full text in a tab-delimited format ideally suited for use by corpus and computational linguistics. With entries arranged both by frequency and alphabetically, A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish enables students of all levels to get the most out of their study of vocabulary in an engaging and efficient way.