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 The Partnership for 21st century skills (2011) identifies these specifically: creativity, collaboration, critical-thinking, and communication.

Some questions to consider before embarking on your journey to personalize learning: Why do you want to personalize learning for your learners? What problems or needs have you identified in your school, organization and/or community? What data can you show that demonstrates the need to personalize learning? What does teaching and learning look like now? What are stakeholders beliefs about learning and change? Why is it critical for your organization and/or community to change now? What challenges or obstacles do you envision as you move to personalizing learning? What do you envision for your personalized learning environment?

digital devices are increasingly viewed as a means to bring students together in collaboration, rather than separate them further.

In the late 1990s, the Singapore Ministry of Education unveiled its master plan for technology. The first phase was spent building up infrastructure and getting computers into schools. In the 2000s, in phases two and three, the ministry focused on training teachers in how to use gadgets and identifying schools to experiment with new innovations.

Replacing written text with artwork, photographs, or illustrations offers a number of advantages, especially early in the school year.  Visual imagery is very accessible and a lot less intimidating to a wide range of learners including non-readers, struggling readers, and English language learners. This enables these students a greater chance to practice some of the forms of complex thinking that they will need as the year progresses such as using text evidence, identifying theme, and making connections.

Another advantage the visual imagery has over written text is that it is very fast to decode.

Artworks can and should be treated just as a written text. By doing so, students can get their academic thinking started early, laying a foundation for them to build on throughout their school year.

 In 2013 I was fortunate enough to hire media specialist/teacher librarian Laura Fleming, who took the initiative to create a makerspace in our school.  Through her work I discovered some guiding principles that might just help you begin to create a makerspace in your school or integrate the process of making across the curriculum.  It is first important to understand three underlying qualities that essential in ensuring that students make to learn:

Making is a process

The right educator makes the difference

Right away, certain patterns emerged. First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls. But when Farr took his findings to teachers, they wanted more. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah. Give me the concrete actions. What does this mean for a lesson plan?’” So Farr and his colleagues made lists of specific teacher actions that fell under the high-level principles they had identified. For example, one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.

key to teaching new literacy skills is to change the focus of student writing.

the value of a written essay lies not in its format but in the skills students develop:  identify a thesis, research and analyze evidence to test the thesis, and then present the analysis results.

Why must these skills be confined to a written format?