Writers and critics wax eloquently about the need to reform schools to reflect the capabilities of 21st-century technologies and economies. But few of them spell out in detail exactly what should be happening in this reformed school -- what the students do from hour to hour, from minute to minute, and how that's different from schools as we have known them. This article sketches the first few hours of a day in the life of a student in such a school.

As you read it, consider these questions:

• How is Sally's life different from the students at your school?
• What went on backstage in order for Sally to do what she does?
• What should the rest of her day include?

6:30 AM
• Sally Student wakes to the ping of an instant message arriving on her laptop. It’s from another student who is working with her on an environmental chemistry project.

• Schoolwork starts early for our hypothetical student, because 180 days times six hours per day is not sufficient to develop the skills and talents of youth necessary to success in the 21st century. And new communication technologies, such as instant messaging, allow students to be connected with their schoolwork and their colleagues all day, every day.

6:35 AM
• She researches, from her laptop, the various laws and guidelines on allowable concentrations of PCBs in drinking water. She finds that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has set the Maximum Contaminant Level at 0.5 parts per billion.

• From her teachers and librarians, our student has learned how to search effectively the online sources that are increasingly available to her, how to determine the authority and reliability of a source, and how to skim the search results to find the germ of truth that she seeks.

6:40 AM
• Sally checks the readings from the probe at the city drinking water monitoring station, which has recently been connected to a web server, so that she can see the readings in real time.

• Real- time data from all over the world is increasingly available to anyone who can connect to the right web page. The curriculum at Sally's school is designed to take advantage of this, and to develop student skill in using it.

6:50 AM
• She sends an instant message to the members of her project group, explaining that she saw concentrations of PCBs of 0.7 and 0.8 ppb at times over the last 24 hours. She attaches a graph of the ups and downs that she constructed with the spreadsheet program on her laptop.

• Sally is a member of a collaborative project group, assigned by her teachers to come up with a solution to an issue of public interest as well as academic importance. The kinds of problems they get, and the ways they work on them, are similar to those in the 21st century world of work.

6:55 AM
• She sends a short report of her findings, with attached data, sources, and graph, to her personal online academic portfolio on the school’s web server.

• Student work at Sally's school is seldom handed in on paper. Rather its kept by each student in an online portfolio, a collection of work that provides evidence of learning to their teachers and might later be used for admission to college or interview for a job.

7:00 AM
• After practicing her violin for five minutes, she breakfasts with her mom and dad. She is careful not to drink any water from the tap.

• At meals, the family often discusses the ideas Sally encounters at school. In fact, the school provides on its web site family discussion questions that tie in to the curriculum.

7:20 AM
• On the subway on the way to school she listens to a podcast of last week’s debate in the state senate on the Clean Water bill, that she downloaded from the school server.

• Sally's school takes advantage of the information devices that students carry in their pockets, by developing and collecting educational podcasts that provide background and extension to the core curriculum materials.

7:30 AM
• The subway is delayed, so she has time to read, from the same iPod, the next chapter of Thoreau’s Walden for English class. She downloaded this and many other readings from the school server.

• The school provides an extensive library of electronic texts that can be downloaded to students’ laptops or to their iPods.

7:55 AM
• At the school library, she meets with two other members of her project group to discuss what they’ve found over the last two days, and what hey need to do next. She learns that the PCB limit in the Senate bill is set at 0.7 ppb.

• The library at Sally's school is no longer just a place to store books -- it’s become the hub of the school, with spaces designed especially to facilitate the small-group project meetings that have become an important mode of learning at the school.

8:10 AM
• In a large-group math class in the small auditorium, Sally learns about statistical sampling techniques in environmental analysis, from a scientist at the EPA in Washington who appears through WebEx connection.

• Desktop videoconferencing capabilities turn any computer at Sally's school into a distance-learning station. Subject-matter experts, guest speakers, and remote teachers make regular appearances in classrooms and at worktables, extending the human resources available to students as they learn.

8:20 AM
• She realizes that her data-gathering from the online probe might not be accurate, because of the small number of sample readings she collected. She questions the scientist in real time over the WebEx connection.

• The statistics concepts she learns in the math class are especially designed to coordinate with the topics and assignments of the science curriculum: it’s not by happenstance that Sally’s small-group project task requires data-sampling and conclusion-making that calls for certain mathematical understandings, that coalesce in a single day.

And it's only twenty after eight!

Please respond to this posting with your thoughts on these questions:

• How is Sally's life different from the students at your school?
• What went on backstage in order for Sally to do what she does?
• What should the rest of her day include?