21st Century Fluency Project

An excellent site well connected into the world of 21st Century Learning. The project is build on a guiding set of "fluencies" and "elements" - a worth while read.

http://www.21stcenturyfluency.com/

Also included on one of the posts on the blog is this "bill of rights" for 21st Century students. I love the respect it shows for students and their learned methods of communicating and accessing information. I also appreciate the need is shows for the teacher in statements like "I need to be taught how to balance my life between the online and offline worlds". I believe this is very much where our students are at. 

http://www.21stcenturyfluency.com/blogpost.cfm?blogID=2454

Rock Wars Project Idea

This project was inspired by a guitar wars assembly seen at College Heghts Sencondary a few years ago. The purpose of the project would be to have students work in teams locally and with other host schools to run a rock wars assemblies internationally. Teams would be responsible for planning the event, promoting the event, designing shirts for participants (possibly done in collaboration with an art class), running sound and lighting equiptment (possibly in collaboration with local experts), running live video coverage of the event with a decibal meter to judge audience response to performers (possibly shared with another school running the event via Skype), and in general making a contribution to the school community by hosting the event!

More is better!

A great article from an excellent site on PBL. Lots of good suggestions to engage students in deeper thinking and more authentic tasks. One of the ideas is that "More is better". I was convicted with their criticism of projects that ask students to take information from one place and put it somewhere else. I think we've all been guilty of assigning these kinds of projects all too often. I'm encouraged not only by the possibilities a truly project based classroom will have to engage students in deeper thinking, more authentic tasks; but also the possibilities of projects that lead to bigger questions, more learning and more projects!
7 Essentials for Project-Based Learning | FreeBIEs | Tools | Project Based Learning | BIE

Examples of Project Based Learning

The more I look into Project Based Learning the more excited I get about its ability to teach students 21st century skills in a dynamic, exciting, applicable learning environment. Discovery Education produced histed a webinar recently on PBL, and publised their powerpoint presentation shared here http://mediashare.discoveryeducation.com/mediashare/index.cfm?event=pushFile&guidAssetMediaFileId=4186022d-2655-8579-76d3-5955f15d7565.

Edutopia is one site that came up in the presentation that, in particular, seems to have a wealth of information on the approach. http://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning.

I've also recently discovered the PBL Co-Laboratory from PBL-online.org. Shortly after creating my free account I had generated a list of 21 of my personal favourite projects from teachers internationally. Its so encouraging to see teachers so willing to share their ideas, and I hope the NLC is able to enspire students to do the same.

Logistics in a 21st Century Classroom

• I've read about a number of schools that have created learning spaces that are very conducive to collaboration and communication. I'd love to see areas dedicated to experimentation - equipped with webcams; areas dedicated to recording audio and video - with some sound buffers; grouped tables for lessons and break out spaces galore!
• Would/ could parents attend monthly meetings? Meetings every term? What would be reasonable yet sufficient to create relationships that foster enhanced student achievement in a radically new environment.
• What will be the balance between 21st century skills and 20th century curriculum? Is it okay to lean toward the here and now?
• How will KRSS ensure the program supports the necessary technology to make such a technological classroom possible? Bandwidth? Print access?

Introducing Students to 21st Century Learning

• writers workshops
• start with activities on interpersonal communication
• who are you as a learner quizzes and activities (demonstrate various ways of learning)
• big emphasis on organizing information: begin with a series of mini lessons where students read various kinds of information (Socials, Science, Math) and decide what kind of graphic organizer to use to summarize the information (use Microsoft Smart Art)
• There are lots of C's tossed around in 21st Century Learning, and the more I get to know them the more I appreciate how these skills can and should take centre stage in a 21st century curriculum: 
• This article from the BCTF outlines them and explains some of the context behind their inception. Here are BC's 7 C's
• • Critical thinking and problem solving,
  • Creativity and innovation,
  • Collaboration, teamwork and leadership,
  • Cross-cultural understanding,
  • Communications, computing and ICT literacy,
  • Career and learning self-reliance, and
  • Caring for personal health and planet earth.

Tools for 21st Century Learning

• Moodle for wikis, blogs, discussion forums (This is the page for the Science and Technology 11 Course I am Teaching (Spring 2012))
• Diigo bookmark groups (This is my personal library, but what I like about Diigo is students could be contributors to "groups" of links and thereby create their own class lists of resources to use together)
• Google Docs for writing, collaborative presentations, etc (This document was created collaboratively as a learning activity to help our Education 446 class at UNBC learn about community resources in First Nations Education and also to experience Google Docs)
• Google just gets better and better. I just discovered their "forms" which allow students to create online surveys, and results to be viewed live. 
• Google+ ?
• You Tube Channels and Playlists (These are some sample playlists I set up on my You Tube Channel so students could view them)  
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