Kevin Blissett: Out of the Cave » skills

21st Century Teaching Skills

admin — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 05:56:53 +0000

Have the skills teachers need for success changed or evolved over time, particularly as we dig in to the 21st century? Certainly, many are the same, but perhaps some are unique to our current tech savvy age. Andrew Churches, a head of the tech department at his school in New Zealand, offers eight essential skills teachers need in the today’s environment.

Not surprisingly, most of the qualities he mentions are qualities we expect of our students (see, for example, IB learner profile). Modeling for students and collaborating with them are two that stood out for me. Check out the list and see what you think.

Another Proponent of Classroom Blogs

admin — Fri, 08 May 2009 16:56:35 +0000

As mentioned in several previous posts, I began including classroom blogs as part of my high school English curriculum this year. (I know, I should’ve been doing a long time ago!) The Tidertechie blog outlines more great reasons to include them as part of any class curriculum and includes suggestions on how to set things up properly. Here’s a snippet of a much larger post:

Why let students blog? The list is infinite: ownership of writing, connection to the world, motivation, authentic audience (not just teacher), multiple learning styles, prepare students for digital citizenship, gallery of class projects, students as teachers, parent connection,….If you would like a true list of reasons for students to blog, it wouldn’t take more that an afternoon of reading blogs to run across everything from the top 20 reasonsto winning a T-shirt You can even hear about blogging straight from the mouth of students. Why did my students start blogging? I wanted them to be part of social technology outside of myspace. I wanted them to actually see “outside of the box” outside of their town, their state, and their nation. I wanted them to take ownership in their education. And I wanted my student from a town of less than 15,000 to see that they truly are part of this world and this world is open to them. Any classroom can have a great journal with provoking higher order thinking questions, but that journal can’t interact with the students, it can’t ask questions, and it can’t expand students view and knowledge.

Ride the Technological Wave in Classrooms, or Get Left Behind

Kevin Blissett — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:41:04 +0000

There continues to be resistance among some in education who see learning social networking skills and online publishing as somehow outside of the framework of the set curriculum. I could not disagree more. I have seen my learners’ writing skills improve astronomically via use of our classroom blogs, and recognize that so much of social interaction, finding a job, shopping, etc. is being done online. These are skills that must be developed–emphasizing the benefits as well as the dangers–in order to prepare learners for success in their future lives.

Julie Lindsay addresses this topic in her e-Learning Journeys blog. An excerpt:

I tried to explain that my class does not end when the students work out the door. The collaboration, interaction and socialisation continues. My students interact with each other, they interact with me, their teacher, via online tools of various names and varieties which could all come under the broad term of ‘social networking’. They have their own online areas, including digital portfolios, as well as community areas. They post to blogs and respond to each other. They are out there using social bookmarking, folksonomy, class wikis, creating podcasts and vodcasts and putting them online, using social imaging (flickr) and anything else I can think of to encourage motivation and excitement in their ultimate quest for learning. I do not apologise for this. I do not essentially see anything wrong with this in 21st century learning. In fact this approach has changed my whole teaching style and changed the way I interact with the students. The development of PLEs (personal learning environments) and ubiquitous and mobile computing means I now start my classes with ‘…open your blogs, refer to the class wiki…etc’ rather than ‘..take out your books and copy from the board’.