The way I see it, digital teaching materials have five key advantages over their tangible counterparts. These benefits are the reason why so many districts, schools and teachers are making the switch to using 21st century technology in the classroom.
In most schools, the adults teach the children.
But in some Broward County classrooms on Friday, the roles were reversed.
The teacher was Adora Svitak, an 11-year-old prodigy and published author from Washington state. She delivered the day's lesson -- a seminar on effective teaching -- live from the television studio in her basement in Redmond. It was broadcast through the Internet into 10 South Florida middle schools.
"Expert Article: Making the Case for Teaching with New Media"
"Why bring new media and technology into the classroom? Why change?" Commonsense media asked Justin Reich, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and EdTechTeacher.org, how he would answer these questions.
If the young people of today are to thrive beyond the walls of the classroom they will need to be able to cope with a world characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The children of todays Kindergarten will enter the workplace in the fourth-decade of the 21st Century. We debate the merits of teaching 21st Century Skills and what they might be while teaching children who have lived their entire lives in that very century. The challenge is how will schools and individual teachers respond to this drive for urgent change.
Unless states that sign on to the movement ensure that all students are also taught a body of explicit, well-sequenced content, a focus on skills will not help students develop higher-order critical-thinking abilities, they said at a panel discussion here in the nation’s capital last week.
Array of Skills
In the Partnership for 21st Century Skills’ vision for K-12 education, the arches of the rainbow depict outcomes, while the pools represent the resources needed to support those outcomes. But critics contend that states implementing this vision might focus too heavily on discrete skills instruction, at the expense of core content.
SOURCE: Partnership for 21st Century Skills
Ten states have agreed to work with P21 to incorporate a focus on technology, analytical and communication skills into their content standards, teacher training, and assessments.
“We’ve been having this curriculum war for years.”
Mr. Kay, in contrast, painted the P21 vision as one that transcends this debate. The partnership tries to encourage states to be more deliberative about how they help students learn the skills,
“[But] the liberal arts movement, which we embrace, has not been as purposeful and intentional about the skill outcomes as we need to be.”
Mr. Willingham argued not only that the teaching of skills is inseparable from that of core content, but also that it is the content itself that allows individuals to recognize problems and to determine which critical-thinking skills to apply to solve them.
Students become proficient critical thinkers only by gleaning a broad body of knowledge in multiple content domains, he said.
Those techniques include student-directed methods such as project-based learning, which requires students to work in groups to solve a specified problem, relying on teachers for guidance rather than for explicit instruction.
“Teachers will rise to the challenge given the kind of supports they need.”
“If [curriculum] is just picking up a manual, or a series of nonconnected or nonsequenced experiments in science or literary works with no connection and no background knowledge, it’s not going to help our kids think any better,” she said in an interview.
Academics like Ms. Darling-Hammond said that setting forth a clear understanding once and for all about what students should know, and which teaching methods best help students engage that content in depth, will be crucial to putting such debates to rest.
The highest-scoring countries on international exams, she said, undertook efforts to outline such goals specifically 20 to 30 years ago.
“When you really think about delivering a rich curriculum, it takes a very skillful type of teaching,” Ms. Darling-Hammond said. “It can be done badly; we have to acknowledge that. But we don’t really have a choice, if we want to join other nations.”
Meanwhile the critics go about squawking while promoting their own panaceas
he majority of kids just go right on tuning out, dropping out, or just getting by
I challenge what I read by looking at source material. These are timeless skills. It's the technology that is 21st century.
As for the topics we are unfamiliar with, the poster just before me rightly points out that the Internet is out there for just that purpose. Real teachers are also learners, and should be constantly seeking to know more.
Many recent studies have concluded that the current system is broken beyond repair and that point solutions like those being advocates above cannot fix it. We know that people learn best when they teach others so small groups that encourage peer-to-peer mentoring should be encouraged. Those same small groups require the students to learn and use the high-performance skills advocated by P21. At the same time, there is a body of knowledge that has been determined to be important to a student's future - represented by the state academic content standards. Robust, in-depth discussions of academic content help achieve the mastery of academic content. To ensure the content has meaning, it is best learned in a multi-disciplinary environment. By embedding a selected set of content standards from a variety of disciplines into a realistic setting/project the students get the opportunity to use the knowledge and go beyond the standards as their interest leads them.
The fact is, while "experts" pore over the fabric of pedagogical delivery methods, online teaching and learning is quietly replacing classroom environments globally. Educators better make some quick adjustments or the very definition of what an "education" means nowadays will make many of these folks irrelevant.
Students need a learning environment that encourages success, but how can a teacher create such a place?
In the classroom, a technical success arises when a teacher prepares her students to succeed, and a technical failure exists when she sets them up to fail.
Just as a store owner must lay out his store for maximum sales, a teacher must set up her classroom as an effective learning environment. The structure may vary with the teacher’s style of teaching and her students’ needs.
It is important to think not only about where students’ desks are located, but also about what’s on top of them. Does one student always color on his desk? Maybe he focuses better while doodling. I can help him out by covering his desk with oversized paper and replacing it when necessary.
Classroom practices should provide students with the path of least resistance to academic success.
Facilitating students’ cooperation, independence, and ability to focus is the key.
Wikis are an exceptionally useful tool for getting students more involved in curriculum. They're often appealing and fun for students to use, while at the same time ideal for encouraging participation, collaboration, and interaction.
Using these ideas, your students can collaboratively create classroom valuables.
A dozen activities are presented for using an online education technology tool to engage students in classroom activities to develop a better understanding of concepts.
the vital priorities for digital education concern largely social, cognitive and civic engagement - not the absence or presence of a particular device in your classroom.
" a model of teaching and learning based on experiential education. It is a model in which authentic, often hands-on, experiences and student interests drive the learning process, and the videos, as they are being proposed in the flipped classroom discourse, support the learning rather than being central or at the core of learning."
"In a nutshell, it works like this: You create presentations in PowerPoint, and \nInteractive Classroom helps you insert real time knowledge checks (called polls) \nalong the way. Polls can include multiple choice, yes/no, or true/false \nquestions, and they seamlessly integrate with the lesson you're teaching. \n\nStudents can connect to your presentation by joining an Interactive \nClassroom session that you create (note that your students will need a network \nconnection). After students join-and it's easy to do, so don't worry about \nspending half your class time setting it up-they see your presentation and the \npoll question(s) you've included in their own OneNote notebook. Students can \nanswer poll questions in OneNote, and you get real-time feedback in the charting \nformat you choose. You can add text or draw on your slides during the session, \nand your students will see the changes you've made in OneNote. They can also add \ntheir own comments and notes on the presentation."
Open source classroom mgt software. Replaces programs like Vision6, LanSchool and NetSupport School.
Intelligent Teaching and Learning with Computers, aka iTALC, gives teachers the tools they need to manage a computer-based classroom without the high license fees of commercial software. Key features include remote control, demo viewing, overview mode, workstation locking and VPN access for off-site students. Operating System: Windows, Linux
A Real Solution For Classroom Teachers
The Solution Site is filled with K-12, hands-on, problem based thematic units with real world relevance. Invite your students to apply 21st Century skills and tools in your classroom everyday by incorporating lessons from The Solution Site
into your teaching.
The Elluminate Teacher Certification Program is designed to help teachers acquire the skills and knowledge needed to teach and learn online. Participants will learn how to use Elluminate Live! to deliver interactive, engaging online learning experiences for K-12 students. The program requires participants to demonstrate a superior command of the use of the Elluminate Live! moderator tools and feature set. Additionally, participants will learn to apply those tools and techniques to create learner centric online classrooms that will increase student achievement and satisfaction. The Elluminate Teacher Certification Program is for anyone, not just Elluminate customers, who wants to excel in the virtual classroom. No prior Elluminate product purchase is necessary. UCSD Extension Education is offering 2 units of credit for completion of the certification.
This handbook is aimed at educational practitioners and school leaders in both primary and secondary schools who are interested in creative and critical uses of technology in the classroom ... This handbook aims to introduce educational practitioners to the concepts and contexts of digital literacy and to support them in developing their own practice aimed at fostering the components of digital literacy in classroom subject teaching and in real school settings.
I think I have found the perfect place to reflect on the way a network, and specifically how Twitter, can impact on what goes on in the classroom. No mains gas,
Despite this being a 'thinking' conference, despite us all being advocates for structured and scaffolded models of thinking, not one group had applied any thinking routines, utilised a collaborative planning protocol or talked about applying an inquiry model or design thinking cycle. It wasn't that we didn't know about them. It wasn't that we don't know how to use them. It wasn't that we don't value them. We had all the knowledge we could desire on the how to and the why of a broad set of thinking tools and anyone of these would have enhanced the process, but we did not use any of them. Why was this the case and what does this reveal about our teaching of these methods to our students?