Week 2 - Digital - 21st Century Skills 20 November 2017

21st Century Skills

The flipped preparation for this week was Grant Litchman's video 'What 60 Schools Can Tell Us About Teaching 21st Century Skills', which can be found in this week's media.

Here are some of the key points he makes in his video:

• Another school may have already solved your problem
• Educational change may be uncomfortable and complicated but it’s not hard
• Schools are becoming, creative, adaptive, permeable, dynamic, systemic, self-correcting
• The 5th sphere - the ‘cognitosphere’ - system of knowledge creation and management
• Where do we want to be? - Dewey, Montessori and Parker
• Problems:
  • Anchors of time, space and subject, Dams and Silos
• Solutions:
  • Teach into the unknown
  • Self-evolving learners
  • Self-evolving organisations
• Education innovation: Preparing students for their future, not our past
• “If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow” - supposedly John Dewey (though in fact Dewey never actually wrote that!)

What do you think are the most important Skills of the 21st Century?

Share your views by filling in the form IN CLASS: tinyurl.com/TMLUC21Nov17You can see the results on the shared spreadsheet. 

Word Clouds

A word cloud is a graphical representation of word frequency and word cloud generators are tools that can map data, like words and tags in a visual and engaging way. The Word Cloud Generator Google Docs add-on calculates the frequency properly (which several other tools don't), but unfortunately it doesn’t have a mechanism for keeping compound phrases together.

21st Century Skills Frameworks

Many skills frameworks seem to converge on a common set of 21st century skills (collaboration, communication, ICT literacy, and social and/or cultural competencies, including citizenship). Most frameworks also mention creativity, critical thinking and problem solving). However, many different terms are used (Voogt & Roblin, 2010). Fox et al. (2012) explore the relationship between co-presence and cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal competencies, which they claim are each needed for deep learning.

These are the 21st Century Skills that ITL decided were important. Do your thoughts align with these?

• Collaboration
• Knowledge construction
• Self-regulation
• Real-world problems / innovations
• ICT for learning
• Skilled Communication

“The purpose of the 21st Century Learning Design Rubrics is to help educators identify and understand the opportunities that learning activities give students to build 21st century skills. A learning activity is any task that students do as part of their school-related work. It can be an exercise that students complete in one class period, or an extended project that takes place both in and outside of school.” (ITL Research, 2012)

In the guide, the description of each rubric has three parts: an overview of definitions of key concepts and related examples, a rubric to help you assign each learning activity a number from 1 to 4 or 5, according to how strongly it offers opportunities to develop a given skill and a flowchart that shows how to choose the best number in each case 

Film making to develop narrative, why is this a relevant skill for an educator?

The learners we have in front of us today are constantly bombarded by a wide range of stimuli that can often be distracting and/or overwhelming. A well constructed teaching resource now has the potential to go beyond a printed worksheet to engage and inspire learners. A practical skill for a teacher is now in the creation of a wide range of media artefacts to support learning inside and outside of the classroom. Filmmaking is a technique that can be effectively created on a wide range of devices from tablets and phones and free web based software like ‘WeVideo’ to digital SLR’s and paid for software. In the hands on element of this session we have the opportunity to look at either Windows Movie Maker or iMovie which are both free on Windows or Mac OS, or alternative tools of your choice. One of the key elements of making an effective video clip is developing the story or plot, and creating an effective narrative. Editing is also an important part in the process as this can have a huge impact on the final product, as we experience in the session.  

Acknowledge your sources

You are probably familiar with the idea of acknowledging your sources in written work, but what about in a video? We encourage you to cite your sources both verbally and visually in your videos For example to cite the ITL rubrics you would include the citation of author and date when you refer to the document (ITL Research, 2012) and the full reference at the end:

ITL Research. (2012). 21CLD Learning Activity Rubrics. Retrieved from https://education.microsoft.com/GetTrained/ITL-Research

Flipped learning activity

This is the flipped learning activity for next week (see next week's task list).

Watch How to problem solve, innovate, structure the content and reference in the DIGITAL 1 video on the portal. There is a supplementary slide set that goes with this video.

Choose one of the ITL rubrics and reflect upon the activities you provide for your students/staff. Film part of that reflection. You can use any device. Make sure the video is no more than 3 minutes long. Publish your video to the Google+ Community with the hashtag #21CSreflection, remember, as always, to add your location specific hashtag. This is your chance to familiarise yourself with your devices, and to honestly reflect upon your own practice. 

Remember to seek help from others - your students, neighbours, TML staff and google could help. We want you to learn to use G+ so that you know how to ask for help with other things. 

References

Fox, H., Frey, S., Grover, S., Schneider, E., Williams, B. & Der Yuen, J. (2012). Learning Core Competencies in a Virtual World. Retrieved fromhttp://edf.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Learning_core_EDF_White_Papers_Fall2012-3.pdf

ITL Research. (2012). 21CLD Learning Activity Rubrics. Retrieved from https://education.microsoft.com/GetTrained/ITL-Research

Voogt, J. & Roblin, N. (2010). 21st Century Skills Discussion paper. University of Twente. Retrieved from http://opite.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/61995295/White%20Paper%2021stCS_Final_ENG_def2.pdf