Standard 4 “Student as an Innovative Designer” relates to almost all of the 21st century skills.  The first indicator of standard 4 involves being creative and thinking critically to test theories and solve problems, both of which are 21st century skills.  The second indicator says that students can use digital tools along with design constraints and take risk versus reward into consideration. This indicator involves the 21st century skills of being technologically literate, information literacy, and critical thinking in order to properly use design tools and evaluate risk versus reward.  The third and fourth indicators involve testing and refining a design and being able to interpret and attack open ended problems. Both indicators involve the 21st century skills of critical thinking, communication or collaboration if you’re working in a group, and tolerance with working with an open ended problem.  

A teacher that helps a student achieve this standard would need to be technologically literate.  In order to help the students integrate technology with critical thinking activities, the teacher needs to understand technology and understand how to help the students learn how to use it as well.  In terms of ISTE standards, a teacher would need to be a designer and able to design and explain how to use technology. The teacher needs to be able to design activities that involve technology or challenge the students to use technology in order for them to achieve standard 4.  

My statistics teacher demonstrated these attributes to help his students achieve standard 4.  He introduced us to various statistical programs similar to excel and used google docs and other online collaborative tools.  We learned three different statistical programs overall and he had us use them periodically to complete practice assignments that challenged our knowledge of the program and how to get it to produce different graphs or perform different statistical tests.