If the 20th century model was to measure the accuracy and ownership of information, the 21st century’s model is form and interdependence. The close thinking needed to grasp this is not beyond the reach of a typical middle school student, but it may be beyond their thinking habits.
If anything, I think Minecraft is making kids smarter. But whenever I say that, the technophobes, the Waldorf parents, and a whole subset of very smart, compassionate, concerned parents and teachers get very curmudgeonly.
We need to stop blaming the video games and start trying to make kids as passionate about the life-world as they are about the game-world. The trouble is that our own egos are in the way.
Describes teacher observation for the 21st century. There is a good TED talk with Bill Gates that describes this. Seems scary, especially the full-time intrusion on the teacher, but the ideas are interesting. What if we gave teachers the opportunity to videotape themselves or have the classroom videotaped for a day and let them watch the tape? Just to let them reflect. Wouldn't that be valuable?
A primary obligation of 21st century teachers is to open the doors to 24/7 learning, helping students understand that they can access education from virtually anywhere, at any time.
productive learning is the learning process which engenders and reinforces wanting to learn more" (p. x). Never has that been more possible than at this moment of abundant access to information, knowledge, and people via the web. But "wanting to learn more" suggests a transfer of power over learning from teacher to student—it implies that students discover the curriculum rather than have it delivered to them. It suggests that real learning that sticks—as opposed to learning that disappears once the test is over—is about allowing students to pursue their interests in the context of the curriculum.
literacy is much more than simply reading and writing texts. The organization's position statement (n.d.) now defines 21st century literacies as including "proficiency with the tools of technology," an ability to "manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information," an ability to "design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes," and more.
Stanford professor Howard Rheingold, believe that technology now requires an attention literacy—the ability to exert some degree of mental control over our use of technology rather than simply being distracted by it
Nice idea of adding a link to the home screen of student or teacher iPads for a google form -- allowing them to give feedback over time that all goes into one form.