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?
I do not believe that the individual teacher is expected to do everything that 21st Century Learning stands for. It is definitely a group/school/district effort. There is where I see a lot of the issues. I look at the PLC idea that we are working on now. How does that fit in? Do we have enough collaboration time as teacher's? And the questions go on. But I guess if we have learned anything from Saint Mary's program it would be, if we stop asking questions, looking for answers, looking toward the future, then we as teachers are done growing as well.
ReplyDeleteDavid, do you do flipped lessons where the students watch the video as homework and then work on learning activities and practice during class time? If so, how long have you been doing this and how do you think it has impacted student learning? A number of math teachers in my building have started doing this in the past couple months, so I'm curious.
ReplyDeleteI like your ideas and how you do a flipped classroom. My only concern is that 8th graders do not have the motivation to watch the videos. They would rather just come to class and put their hand into the air without any thought taking place. I also worry about the access to technology. I have several families that don't have email addresses, which makes me wonder what kind of internet access or technology they have at home. I may try a few in the future to see how it works.
ReplyDeleteI also like the idea of a flipped classroom, but I think it would be a challenge if not all my students have access to technology at home. Do you have any students without internet access? What do they do? I am also curious about your video lessons - what is the average length of each lesson?
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