Janelle's+Concluding+Assignment

Concluding Assignment For my concluding assignment, I have chosen to address each one of the essential questions from the course individually. In both reflections, I have interwoven some links to resources that I have found over the past semester that exemplify particular concepts and ideas related to the essential questions.

What do we mean by the "21st century classroom"?

I believe that the essence of a 21st century classroom is in the concept of evolution. To truly obtain and sustain a 21 century classroom, evolutions in teaching and learning must be constantly occuring. Inevitably, technology plays a major role in these evolutions as it is becoming more and more important in our society. To me, the 21st century classroom is one that mirrors society and its needs. We mut look toward the future and prepare our students accordingly. Therefore, the evolutions that take place will be through technology and for technology. As the technology evolves, so then should our classrooms. Unlike many other come and go movements in education, this is not a fad. It is a part of our daily lives; a part of our work and our play. Because its importance in our lives and society continues to increase, we must usher in the evolution of our classrooms so that they support 21st century skills that are undoubtedly going to be so vital in the lives of our students. I don't think many teachers would disagree with importance of technology and the 21st century skills, but I think that more of them need to assume the role of facilitator in these things. We cannot all assume that someone else will teach them or that the students will learn it on their own. It is an evolution that we must all be a part of.

I am enjoying embracing my journey into a 21st century classroom and am excited about the other changes I will make. Prior to this class, I was interested in using technology and certainly understood its importance but was unsure about how to implement more of it and what else was out there that would connect with the kind of teaching and learning occuring in my English classroom. The most immediate effects that I have observed from implementing things like the //Hamlet// Facebook page and dramatic speech vodcast are how they foster student creativity and active engagement with a piece of text. //Hamlet// by itself can be a daunting unit for any student,especially for my 12th grade on-level students. They often see little to no connections between the text and themselves and are immediately turned off when they hear it is something written by Shakespeare. For some students, the word Shakespeare is synonomous with language they cannot understand and boring characters and plot.The Facebook and vodcasting projects give an extra shot of vitality to the unit. The students are excited to complete these projects, and I am excited that they are actually excited to do them. During these, the students are engaged and utilizing a variety of skills, both 21st century and literary. If one was to look at my classes on the days that we are doing these projects, I think he or she might capture a brief snapshot of what the 21st century classroom looks like as my students use technology to create something new and make sense of a text that we read. Students are learning to use communicative tools like Facebook, Audacity, and Photo Story, but they are also collaborating, creating, and designing. These are all 21st century skills that they are going to need, and they are strengthening them through //Hamlet//, a play written in the beginning of the 17th century. Shakepeare had his stage at the Globe, and my students have a computer.

Because of initial experiences with things like the Facebook and vodcasting projects, I have come to understand that the evolution to a 21st century classroom brings with it a totally different style of teaching and learning. It places less emphasis on the need for traditional instruction that is delivered to students as they seat in neat little rows. If that was the way of education during the Industrial Age, then it is time for use to embrace a new age. If in the beginning, we set up educational institutions that reflected the needs of our society at a time of industrialization, why then can we not change these institutions to reflect the needs of our society at a time of technological advancement? I see the 21st century classroom as a place were the teacher acts as the facilitator to a curriculum that can sometimes be messy as students emerge from their rows and begin working with technology hands on.

How do we apply technology tools in meaningful ways so that we can more easily achieve effective teaching and learning in the 21st century?

In order to use technology in meaningful ways that go beyond surface level technical skills, we must first understand the meaningful ways in which technology can be used. First and foremost, we must recongize that technology and its use in education is always changinging and advancing. Therefore, it is our duty to remain aware of these changes so that we are implementing it in the most meaningful and significant ways. For some teachers who do not have much experience using technology in the classroom, this can be a difficult task as they are not quite comfortable with its implementation. I think that this is where other teachers who are more skilled with its use should help to support and guide those struggling colleagues toward using technology to support a 21st century classroom.

Secondly, meaningful technology use has to involve collaboration, whether it is students collaborating with students, teachers collaborating with students, or teachers collaborating with teachers. Technology's multifaceted nature makes it the ultimate facilitator for collaboration and communciation. Because these are two important 21st century skills, we have to expose our students to these skills and show them how to collaborate and communicate using technology. Technology has removed so many boundaries from learning that takes place in our classrooms, and we need to show students how collaboration helps them to make the best use of information and resources that are virtually limitless.

If we are going to expect our students to use technology, they we must be avid users of it ourselves. One of the most important things I have discovered is how much technology can be used to help teachers improve their own pedagogical repetoire and access professional development initiatives. [|Teachers Pay Teachers.com.] is a site that fosters sharing of everything from assessments to lesson plans to technology-based activities between educators. Previously I have utilized this site to find materials for my classes, but during this class, I decided to begin sharing some of my own work. The character Facebook page project was the first thing that I posted, but I am eager to go through my files and find other things that might be useful to other educators. It is true that we should strive to have our students collaborate through their use of technology, but I think meaningful use of it also involves teachers using it to collaborate with eachother and share best practices. Because technology involves such a vast amount of resources, no one person can be an expert on everything that is out there. Therefore, we should rely on eachother's strengths in order to expand our knowledge of its use in our classrooms.

In addition to collaboration, another important characteristic of meaningful technology use is that it enhances the learning process and compliments the contet being taught, thereby allowing students to dig deeper. Using technology for the sake of using it is not meaningful, much like our class discussions about using a smartboard on which to simply project documents or write notes. It is important to me that whatever technological innovations I make are significant enough to enhance my students' understanding of our content. For example, I am teaching a new course next semester and have already planned to incorporate technology where I feel it best fits. The course is 10th grade on-level English, and I am hoping to use technology to help these students engage with and better understand the literature of the course. We will be reading the novel //Of Mice and Men//, and I am going to set up a class wiki in conjunction with our study of the novel. I am hoping to create multiple activities and assignments using the wiki, but one specific idea that I have is to have the students work in pairs to create a wiki page reviewing one of the chapters of the novel. If each pair takes a chapter, then the students will be collaborating not only in the creation of their wiki but also because after each wiki is complete, the students will have a way to review the entire novel chapter by chapter by visiting eachother's pages. Each group will have added pieces of information to the whole.

I can no longer imagine teaching without using technology. As I continue on in my career, I hope to integrate it more and more. I envision a time in the near future where every student has access to a laptop in my classroom on a regular basis. There are kindles instead of textbooks and ipods instead of notebooks. Classrooms with traditional rows of desks are far and few between, and students are up and moving as they collaborate, create, design, problem solve, communciate, and analyze using technology. It is a world I am excited to be a part of.