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Voice of the Educator Guest Blogger 3 ways to infuse 21st-century skills into instruction By Sandy Merz on February 8th, 2016 | Comments (0) 10 inShare Pixabay SmartBlog on Education this month is exploring 21st-century teaching and learning. Join us for original content in which experts explore the trends and highlight best practices that can help prepare students for their future worlds of work and living. All teachers seek to prepare students for life after high school. These days that means equipping them with the skills it will take to survive in the 21st century workplace, while also covering other curriculum requirements. What concrete examples of 21st century workplace skills like communication, self-management, collaboration, motivation and inquiry do you focus on in your classroom? As an interesting parallel, how do your examples compare with these actual comments from employees and their supervisors who participated in the Arizona K12 Center's Lesson2Life professional development?

"Even if you have a 21st Century classroom(flexible and adaptable); even if you are a 21st Century teacher ; (an adaptor, a communicator, a leader and a learner, a visionary and a model, a collaborator and risk taker) even if your curriculum reflects the new paradigm and you have the facilities and resources that could enable 21st century learning - you will only be a 21st century teacher if how you teach changes as well. Your pedagogy must also change. "

Literacy Is Not Enough: 21st Century Fluency for the Digital Age by Ian Jukes

"Talk to technology people at school districts, and nearly everyone wants to take their community in the same direction. The most progressive districts today are moving away from teacher-focused education and toward student-centric learning." "Teachers really need to understand this instructional shift," she says. "They must become 21st-century learners before they can be 21st-century teachers."

"This conversation is starting to get old. It is 2011, not 1875. It's time we collectively got our heads out of our filters and prepare students properly for the world they will graduate into, not the world we grew up in. Everyone needs to be vocal, everyone needs to be an advocate for students in the 21st Century. I've written about this before, but the message is still not getting through. The red tape and fears are mounting and students are suffering in the wake of ill-informed adults. The Internet filters, in their current state, have got to go. Protecting students is one thing; a blanket denial of modern learning is another."

"I've invited my colleague Brandon Wiley (Twitter: @bwileyone), who directs Asia Society's International Studies Schools Network, to share some advice for new teachers on how to create a global classroom for the 21st century."

"One of the perplexing things that teachers and educators encounter when trying to understand educational technology and leverage into their classrooms is the abundance of those baffling techie terms. Blended Learning is different from Differentiated Learning, Educational Technology might not be necessarily Instructional Technology, a Virtual Classroom is different from an Electronic Classroom or Flipped Classroom; there is also asynchronous, synchronous, and personalized learning, these and many more are but some examples of the growing terminology in this field. This infographic is dubbed Ed Tech Cheat Sheet is a fabulous guide to help you learn about the important trends in educational technology."

"As I wrote in my last column, the traditional skill we have valued in teachers when paper was the dominant media-the ability to transfer knowledge of a subject-is becoming less important. Increasingly, a teacher's knowledge can be found online and in various learning styles. As the internet drives down the value of a teacher's knowledge, their ability to personalize learning with resources from around the world will increase. We will have more data generated about our students as we build out our online communities. We will need teachers who understand how to make meaning of this data to personalize learning for every student from a vast digital library of learning resources. Also, of increasing value is their ability to teach students to be self-disciplined about how "to learn to learn." Rather than losing overall value, teachers will be more important than ever. The big change is not adding technology to the current design of the classroom, but changing the culture of teaching and learning and fundamentally changing the job descriptions of teachers and learners. I offer seven questions we typically ask of teachers in the interview process, along with corresponding questions I think are geared to align with how the internet will force the redefinition of a teacher's added value..."

"Not all that long ago, the term "mobile learning" implied laptop computers and mobile carts that were wheeled from classroom to classroom. Now, as a growing number of students carry smart phones, tablets, and other mobile devices that can connect to the internet wirelessly through a cellular as well as a Wi-Fi connection, the definition of "mobile learning" is expanding-and with it, the possibilities inherent in the term."

Blended learning perspectives...

"Just a few years ago, the idea of using a mobile phone as a legitimate learning tool in school seemed far-fetched, if not downright blasphemous. Kids were either prohibited from bringing their phones to school, or at the very least told to shut it off during school hours. But these days, it's not unusual to hear a teacher say, "Class, turn on your cell. It's time to work.""

"Expecting students to read deeply and draw meaningful conclusions is at the heart of the Common Core ELA standards. Students are asked to read closely, cite evidence, and make evidence based inferences when they read. They are expected to deepen their learning by valuing textual evidence and reading critically. Annotating text is one way students can cite textual evidence, infer and deepen meaning as they read.. "

"Editor's Note: Andrew Miller is a consultant for the Buck Institute for Education, an organization that specializes in project-based curriculum. He also creates curriculum and instruction at Giant Campus, which seeks to create 21st century learners using PBL in an online environment. "

"February 5, 2011 Paula Naugle and Jan Wells are 4th grade teachers from Louisiana and Kansas. In this webinar they share their lessons learned, experiences, and celebrations as Skype buddies."

"Online social networking includes much more than Facebook and Twitter. It is any online use of technology to connect people, enable them to collaborate with each other, and form virtual communities."

"Growing numbers of Twin Cities teachers are embracing blogs as a way to improve their students' writing skills, and students are discovering how they can connect with a global audience."

"How to Use the "4 C's" Rubrics - This excerpt appears in the Buck Institute for Education's book, "PBL for 21st Century Success: Teaching Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication, Creativity." Rubrics for each of the "4 C's" are in the book, and we offer guidance below on how to use them in a PBL context."

"It is time that teachers and administrators realize that public education has reached a dam in the river. We have gone about as far as we can go with isolated instruction and learning. While it may have served the purpose for the older generations, it does not meet the deeper learning needs of students today and tomorrow. Deeper learning can be accelerated by consolidating teacher efforts and combining relevant contents, in effect, opening new spillways of knowledge. "

"This is a crucial time for education. Every system in every country is in the process of figuring out how to reboot education to teach skills, application, and attitude in addition to recall and understanding. Helping students be able to grapple with increased problem solving and inquiry, be better critical and creative thinkers, show greater independence and engagement, and exhibit skills as presenters and collaborators is the challenge of the moment. That's why so many educators are using the project based learning (PBL) model. PBL has proven to be a means for setting up the kind of problem-solving challenges that engage students in deeper learning and critical inquiry. It requires students to research, collaborate, decide on the value of information and evidence, accept feedback, design solutions, and present findings in a public space-all factors that create the conditions under which high performance and mastery are most likely to emerge. The rise of PBL, in fact, is a success story for education."

"Just look at the fourth- and fifth-grade students at Dater Elementary School. They participated in a "Global Progressive Story," collaborating with students from 200 schools in 21 states and eight countries on 18 stories that are featured on the website writeyourstory.wikispace.com."