21st Century Learning

21st Century Learning is moving beyond the standard passive learning of being in a desk and memorize the content.   It requires the students to learn how to communicate effectively with the technologies around them.  Learning to collaborate with their teachers and peers and beyond.  Using critical thinking skills to formulate their answers and to creativity in producing and demonstrating their knowledge. 

How I implement these skills in my classroom is to first communicate with them by having my lessons in videos.  They can email me questions that they have from those video notes.  In the classroom, I have the students work in cooperative groups to help one another and they are able to explain the examples in different ways that they understand.  Using the technology of their iPads, the students are able to produce their own examples to demonstrate their understanding of the material.

 The challenges that I face in implementing is finding opportunities for the students to demonstrate their creativity in solving problems.  How do I measure their critical thinking skills from projects and finding time to do this in the classroom?  I have the students work in groups at times but how do you get the reserved kids to collaborate and communicate with others?

Writing about a change I would like to make in my classroom.


A couple of changes that I would like in my classroom is for the students to keep track of their own progress in the learning of the new topics.  I hope to create a self-reflection worksheet that would correspond with the material.  It would keep track of how much effort they put into their homework, keeping up with my video notes and how often do they come in for help.  I want to challenge the students to be more specific in their action of getting help or identifying how they can help themselves in understanding the topics.