Chapter 20
I2Flex: The Meeting Point of Web-Based Education and Innovative Leadership in a K–12 International School Setting Maria D. Avgerinou, Stefanos Gialamas and Leda Tsoukia
1 Introduction If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow. John Dewey
As Bob Pearlman, one of the key leaders in USA’s educational reform, points out (2010), a casual walk into any new brick-and-mortar schools across the USA reveals that despite the elaborate architectural designs and the wiring for educational technology integration, classrooms remain designed for teachers to stand in front of the students, thus still reflecting schooling as invented in the nineteenth century. Since those bygone and long past times however, the world has developed in such diverse directions and created new and particularly complex demands for citizenship, college, and careers that it is no longer possible for old learning environments associated with old learning paradigms to accommodate them. Indeed, “we are on the threshold of a tipping point in public education” (Kay 2010, p. xiii). The recognition of the new reality has led to the development of a new vision for twenty-first-century learning. In 2010, Dede reported that current conceptual frameworks for twenty-first-century skills included the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (2006), the North Central Regional Education Laboratory (NCREL) and the Metiri Group (2003), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 2005), and the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America’s M. D. Avgerinou () American Community Schools Athens, 129 Aghias Paraskevis Str., 152 34 Halandri, Athens, Greece e-mail: avgerinoum@acs.gr S. Gialamas American Community Schools Athens, 129 Aghias Paraskevis Str., 152 34 Halandri, Athens, Greece e-mail: gialamas@acs.gr L. Tsoukia ACS Athens, 4 Voutsina St, 156 69 Papagou, Athens, Greece e-mail: lt@ltdesign.gr; ledatsoukia@gmail.com D. G. Sampson et al. (eds.), Digital Systems for Open Access to Formal and Informal Learning, 329 DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-02264-2_20, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014