"TEN TAKEAWAY TIPS FOR TEACHING CRITICAL THINKING
Ten Takeaway Tips for Teaching Critical ThinkingSuggestions from educators at KIPP King Collegiate High School on how to help develop and assess critical-thinking skills in your students. Ideally, teaching kids how to think critically becomes an integral part of your approach, no matter what subject you teach."
We often read that there are 4 C's in a true 21st century education: critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation. The iPad is a success at engaging individual students in critical thinking and creativity, but how about collaboration? After all, tablets are consumer products, designed to be used by one person at a time, not by teams of students. It's up to teachers and instructional technologists to figure out how best to deploy them in the classroom in a way that supports project-based learning and fosters teamwork. We asked several teachers involved in iPad initiatives which apps they've had the most success with on the collaboration front. Here is what they told us.
"If you Google "four c's of technology integration" you'll get links to a myriad of "c-words" including Creativity/Creation, Consumption, Curation, Connection, Collaboration, Communication and Critical Thinking. All of these are important elements of learning and can be enhanced with the use of technology, but for the sake of this article, I am going to focus more on what devices themselves can do, so my four C's are the following: "
Questions that probe for deeper meaning and set the stage for further questioning
foster the development of critical thinking skills and higher order capabilities such
as; problem solving, and the understanding of complex systems. A good essential
question is the principle component of designing inquiry-based learning - the
typical 'Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How?' of a course of study.
"Project Tomorrow is a national education nonprofit group based in Irvine, California.
The vision of Project Tomorrow is ensure that today's students are well prepared to be tomorrow's innovators, leaders and engaged citizens of the world. We believe that by supporting the innovative uses of science, math and technology resources in our K-12 schools and communities, students will develop the critical thinking, problem solving and creativity skills needed to compete and thrive in the 21st century. "