The TPACK framework for teacher knowledge is described in detail, as a complex interaction among three bodies of knowledge: Content, pedagogy, and technology.

When workplaces and our civic and educational institutions draw from and connect to young people’s peer culture, communities and interest-driven pursuits, learners flourish and realize their true potential.

Connected learning environments link learning in school, home and community because learners achieve best when their learning is reinforced and supported in multiple settings. Online platforms can make learning resources abundant, accessible and visible across all learner settings.

The most engaged learning happens while doing something for a meaningful goal or purpose, whether that is creating something, contributing to a community, or engaging in a friendly competition.

Powered with possibilities made available by today’s social media, this peer culture can produce learning that’s engaging and powerful.

Connected learning prizes the learning that comes from actively producing, creating, experimenting and designing because it promotes skills and dispositions for lifelong learning and for making meaningful contributions to today’s rapidly changing work and social conditions.

Interests foster the drive to gain knowledge and expertise. Research has repeatedly shown that when the topic is personally interesting and relevant, learners achieve much higher-order learning outcomes. Connected learning views interests and passions that are developed in a social context as essential elements.

While wealthy families are embracing the potential of new technologies for learning, and investing more and more in out-of-school and connected learning, less privileged kids are being left behind. Access to specialized, interest-driven and personalized learning used to be difficult and scarce. But in today’s networked world, there’s no reason why all children should not have the opportunity to pursue connected learning.

Traditional education is failing to engage many students as they enter their middle school, high school, and college years. The culture clash between formal education and interest-driven, out-of-school learning is escalating in today’s world where social communication and interactive content is always at our fingertips. We need to harness these new technologies for learning rather than distraction.

The “connected” in connected learning is about human connection as well as tapping the power of connected technologies. Rather than see technology as a means toward more efficient and automated forms of education, connected learning puts progressive, experiential, and learner-centered approaches at the center of technology-enhanced learning.

Connected learning is when someone is pursuing a personal interest with the support of peers, mentors and caring adults, and in ways that open up opportunities for them

The perfor-mance tasks ask students to apply their learning to a new and authentic situation as means of assessing their understand-ing and ability to transfer their learning.

Six facets of under-standing—the capacity to explain, interpret, apply, shift perspective, empa-thize, and self-assess—can serve as indicators of understanding.

The 21C Skills, combined with the web literacy skills, are the nexus for entry-level digital-age skills. They are a set of abilities such as problem-solving, creativity, collaboration, or communication that people need to develop in order to succeed in the information age.

Good online readers know the tools and strategies that can be used to search for and locate people, resources, and information. They then know how to judge the credibility of these sources

The classroom culture should value questioning, hypothesizing, and openness to new ideas and perspectives.

A project should give students opportunities to build such 21st century skills as collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and the use of technology, which will serve them well in the workplace and life

Teachers can powerfully activate students' need to know content by launching a project with an "entry event" that engages interest and initiates questioning.

But it is the process of students' learning and the depth of their cognitive engagement— rather than the resulting product—that distinguishes projects from busywork.

closes the achievement gap for underserved populations, improves understanding and retention of content, and increases motivation for all students.

In the top 10 were qualities like the ability to work on a team, problem-solving skills, written and verbal communication skills, and initiative.

Because our default setting is to teach our material out of context, students rarely see its relevance.

In a traditional classroom, we deliver content to students, give them opportunities to practice or apply what they learned, and eventually conduct a summative assessment—this could take the form of a test or it could be more of a performance assessment, like an essay, a speech, or a project of some kind.