Youth Basketball Parents – 9 Tips To Help Your Child Succeed! ~ Basketball Manitoba. 9 Digital Learning Tools Every 21st Century Teacher Should Be Able To Use. The 21st century is a time of rapid change, and while the brain may not be changing (much), the tools we use to feed it are. This puts the 21st century teacher in a critical spot–of mastering constantly evolving technology and digital learning tools–the same tools their students use every day. So below, we’ve started with 9 such tools, but this is obviously just scratching the surface. This list is not meant to be exhaustive (obviously), or even authoritative (but rather, subjective). This is the 21st century, after all.
And incidentally, it pairs nicely with a related post, 36 Things Every 21st Century Teacher Should Be Able To Do. Let us know what we missed on twitter or facebook. 1. While Google Reader is going the way of the dodo, social readers like Pulse and Flipboard continue to surge in popularity because they’re attractive, accessible across devices, and make it easy to skim large amounts of information at once. Why Every 21st Century Teacher Should Be Able To Use It 2. 3. 5. 6. 7. Annual Events. Teachers are Learning Designers. Late in 2012, I wrote a blog for the Huffington Post that articulated what I really feel should be and is a role of great teachers.
Great teachers are "learning designers" who seek to create a space where all students are empowered to learn. I was further inspired to rearticulate this idea when I saw this video from Sir Ken Robinson: What really struck me is that great teachers create the conditions for success, just as gardeners do. You can't make a flower grow, but you can design and improve the condition for that flow of naturally occurring events.
It's the same for our students. We have the power and the duty to create the best conditions for students to flourish. Empower Yourself For so long, teachers have been disempowered to design. Stop Blaming Kids There is one pitfall in Sir Ken Robinson's metaphor of teachers as gardeners and students as fruit. Revise and Reflect Are more voice and choice or self-directed learning needed? 21C learners need 21C teachers. "If your school, and your school day, is not about students collaborating, connecting, and building knowledge and understandings together, why would anyone come? " - Ira David Socol Collaborative knowledge building has been the path from which most innovation has emerged. Jonas Salk, whose work virtually ended the polio epidemic, began thinking about a cure when he was working with his mentor, Dr.
Thomas Francis on an influenza vaccine. From there, Salk's innovative thinking spearheaded the research. He was not in a lab by himself. Architects, people in business, educators, politicians, all solve problems in concert with colleagues from the same and different fields. The research on learning reveals that "Studies of students' discussions in classrooms indicate that they learn to use the tools of systematic inquiry to think historically, mathematically, and scientifically" (Blansford p. 189).
There are teachers as well as leaders occupying these two 'camps'. Promoting a Culture of Learning. Learning is a culture. It starts as a culture with the students as human beings needing to understand their environment. And it ends as a culture with students taking what we give them and using it in those physical and digital environments they call home. Even the practices that promote or undermine the learning process itself are first and foremost human and cultural artifacts. Literacy, curiosity, self-efficacy, ambition and other important agents of learning are born in the native environments of students' homes. Further, learning is ongoing, perishable and alive -- just like culture.
Creating Culture But what about your classroom? The short answer is that a culture of learning is a collection of thinking habits, beliefs about self, and collaborative workflows that result in sustained critical learning. Or that's how I think of it, anyway. Can you cause this to happen? "Intentionally letting" may seem like an oxymoron. Use the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model 1. 2. 3. Sustainability. 3 Instructional Learning Strategies for Problem Readers. As educators, we are always looking for new techniques to help our struggling readers. Our job is to find learning strategies that will not only help our students succeed, but that will make it easier for them to learn, and develop a love for reading. While on your quest to present the best learning strategies that will be optimally learnable for all students, try a few of the following activities in your classroom.
These instructional techniques can be used with all reading levels and represent a variety of ways to encourage proficient reading. Directed Listening-Thinking Activity The Directed Listening-Thinking Activity (DLTA) is an instructional technique that was developed for students who have not yet mastered independent reading. Procedure Before Reading More than 100 nations have prohibited the practice of corporeal punishment.... Here are a few ideas to help you prepare and get the most out of an educational... The teacher tote is mandatory for being a teacher. During Reading. Helping Students Understand What a Test Is and Is Not. We are facing a problem with tests in education. Students are strongly influenced by the implied messages they deduce from what is being tested, especially when the test is emphasized as high stakes in terms of their grades. Further, they can draw dangerous conclusions about their own role in the learning process by what is done with the assessment results.
Putting the Assessment in Context We've all taken tests, and we've felt either proud or ashamed of the results, often following a tense waiting period. Students share these feelings and may assume that their intelligence level is reflected on a given test, especially when told that significant portions of their grades are based on their test performance. Deepening the challenge is the limited range of questioning and response. We can also communicate -- both before we give the tests and when we return the scores -- the scale, purpose and limitations of this particular assessment. Preventing Assessment-Related Damage to Learning. Different examples of formative assessment. A Guidebook for Social Media in the Classroom. Is Social Media Relevant? Take the Quiz Before we talk social media, let's talk about the relevance of social media by taking a quiz.
Which of the following is most likely to be true? ☐ Should we teach letter-writing in the classroom? Kids need to write letters and mail them. But what if they become pen pals with strangers and share private information with them? The Social Media Answer ☑ There's one form of writing that can arguably get someone fired, hired or forced to retire faster than any other form of writing. One form of writing is that powerful. If you guessed social media, you're right. The Social Media Myth The myth about social media in the classroom is that if you use it, kids will be Tweeting, Facebooking and Snapchatting while you're trying to teach.
You don't even have to bring the most popular social media sites into your classroom. 12 Ways Teachers are Using Social Media in the Classroom Right Now Tweet or post status updates as a class. It's in the Standards. Teaching Students to Embrace Mistakes. For the last ten years, we've worked one-on-one with students from elementary school through graduate school. No matter their age, no matter the material, when you ask what they're struggling with, students almost universally name a subject: "math," "English" or, in some instances, "school. " Doubting that all of school is the issue, we then ask to see their last test. After some grumbling, the student digs down, deep into the dark, dank recesses of his or her backpack, and pulls out a balled-up, lunch-stained paper that, once smoothed out, turns out to be the latest exam. To a teacher, this should be incredibly frustrating.
The Science Behind Mistakes Telling students they need to take advantage of the feedback they get isn't just good advice -- it's established science. Picture a classical violinist rehearsing. Mistakes are the most important thing that happens in any classroom, because they tell you where to focus that deliberate practice. Credit: Hunter Maats and Katie O'Brien.