Peter Cevenini, director of K-12 education for Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group, thinks so. Speaking before hundreds of students, school administrators and state officials at the University of Charleston Thursday, he said that when his second-grade son was asked to write a book report for class, the teacher had him submit it as a blog entry.

More than nine out of 10 teenagers use social networking sites, according to information provided Cevenini and other speakers. The number of internet-connected devices will have grown from 500 million in 2006 to 1 trillion by 2011. And even the newest textbooks contain information that is four years old by the time students first crack open their covers.

“So have classrooms really changed in the United States, even though we know that children have changed, their world have change, and their houses have changed?” he said. “The problem across the United States … the problem with classrooms across the world is they haven’t changed to meet the needs of the students.”

Just how to bring about that change was the topic of the Summit on Global Competitiveness hosted by Gov. Joe Manchin in the campus ballroom. The summit was a daylong event focusing on how the state’s education system could best prepare students for the future work force.

West Virginia is a state that has traditionally taken on the labor-intensive, “heavy” jobs, and there’s nothing wrong with that, Manchin said.

“We will continue to be that type of a state, but now we have to hone our skills sets and raise our attainment levels higher than ever before, because it will be demanded upon us in order to compete,” he said.

But the Mountain State is already behind the starting line in the race to catch up to the information age. It has the smallest number of residents with four-year college degrees as a percentage of its population in the nation. Also, an analysis done for the state Board of Education concluded that not only do state eighth-graders rank behind their peers in other states in test scores, but also behind their peers in many European and Asian countries.

West Virginia is going to need to think globally when preparing students for the labor market, according to Alex Kaplan, director of education industry global business services for IBM. His company doesn’t look at borders when hiring new employees.

“It really doesn’t matter where an individual lives,” he said. “It matters what an individual knows.”

The presenters viewed the use in technology in classrooms as key to preparing students for the classroom. They noted that today’s youngest generation live in a world where the Internet and easy access to information has always been omnipresent, and from a young age they are using the tools to tap into that information.