What Will Teaching in the 21st Century be Like?

Professor Dancealot 

The way that kids are being taught in classrooms is constantly changing. My elementary school classrooms didn't even resemble the ones you see in most schools today. If you would have handed me and Ipad in the second grade I would have had no idea what to do with it. Now, most of these second graders that know how to use Ipads better than I do! 21st century teaching is more about guiding students rather than just teaching them. A good example of this is the Professor Dancealot video. It shows a teacher trying to teach a dance class by lecturing. Students spend the entire class sitting in their seats listening to a power point presentation about dancing. When they show up for the final exam at the end of the semester there is a camera and the teacher tells them to grab a partner and dance. After an entire semester of just taking notes, they are expected to know how to dance. I think the video is over exaggerated, but it definitely has truth to it. This is the method that a lot of teachers are still using. Just giving kids information and testing them on it later is learning. It's just memorization.

Teaching in The 21st Cenury

Role of the Teacher

     -Filter

Main sources of knowledge for students

     -Social Media

     -YouTube

     -Google

     -Blogs

     -Cellphones

Where will the learn about...

     -Pirating

     -Plagiarism

     -Slander

     -Copyright

     -Crowd sourcing

     -Confidentiality

Engagement vs. Entertainment

     -Engagement and entertainment are not the same

   Entertainment                                      Engagement

      Passive                                                  Active

      Enjoyment                                             Learning

      Short-term                                            Long lasting results

      Doesn't require relevance                      Meaningful and applicable

     Creativity of others                                 Creativity of participant

Teaching in the 21st Century is a prezi presentation by Kevin Roberts that describes the way you should prepare yourself to be a future teacher. There are a lot of things that students need to learn about when using technology in the classroom. It's our job as teachers to be the filters with what they're learning. Most students are going to learn how to use Google and social media sites from home or their peers. Our job is to make sure that they use these tools correctly and responsibly. The prezi also compares entertainment and engagement. I agree that students should be engaged more than entertained. A student that is engaged is going to get more long-term effects than a student that is just being entertained.

The Networked Student

The Networked Student is a video by Wendy Drexler that describes the learning method of a student at a 21st century high school. He doesn't use a textbook and the teacher almost never lectures. He learns through connections that he has formed with other students, teachers, and more. He stays connected through blogs and other tools. He creates a blog to reflects his thoughts and subscribes to other people's blogs as well. I think that this could be a very effective way to learn. The student is learning a lot more because he is going outside the classroom to learn. In the video, the student had classroom lectures on his Ipod from a teacher at Berkeley. 

Harness Yours Students' Digital Smarts

Vicki Davis is a teacher in a rural town in Georgia that uses technology to connect her students the world. They connect and collaborate assignments with other students from different areas or countries. I really like that she doesn't just tell her students the meaning of new words that she uses in class. She expects her students to find the definition for themselves. I think that teaches her students that she isn't going to do everything for them. It probably helps them remember the terms better as well. In the video, she says that her students were also teaching her some thing about what they were working on. 

Who's Ahead in the Learning Race?

I definitely think that Elementary students are ahead in the learning race. If I were to walk into one of their classrooms, they would be teaching me how to use macs. I don't know how to do half of the things that the students were working on in the video. Macs are foreign to me and I have no idea how to use a QR. These students are more literate in technology than I am and they're only in elementary school. I can't even imagine how much they are going to be able to do when they get to college.

Bringing the Locker Room into the Classroom

Bringing the Locker Room into the Classroom describes how Craig Owens uses coaching techniques in his classroom. He started to notice that he was the center of the class. Students always looked to him for the answers instead of trying to find the answers for themselves. He got the idea from a basketball game where he was an honorary coach. While in the locker room, he saw the players discussing, debating, and asking questions. Everything that he also wanted to see in his classroom. I think that using coaching methods could work very well in a classroom. Students could work as teams to solve problems like teams work together to win games. I think it helps students a lot more when they work together. It gives them team work skills and forces them to find a solution together. I would definitely use a method like this in my classroom.