21st Century Learning

This video describes why 21st Century learning is so important for today's students. "Students will use engaging technologies in collaborative, inquiry-based learning environments with teachers who are willing and able to use technology's power to assist them in transforming knowledge and skills into products, solutions, and new information."

This video is my relevant for starting conversations about today's students being "digital learners." It also leads to great questions for educators to ponder in regards to the effectiveness of curriculum and student engagement. It also gives examples of how technology can be used effectively in the classroom to encourage the new 3 R's: rigor, relevance, and relationships.

The Library of Congress is responsible for this video. This is a great resource for getting conversations started about how to refashion learning for the 21st Century learner. This video was different from the others because it established that not only are our students learners of 2st Century Skills, but as educators we are too. We must all be learners and teachers within the 21st Century classroom. This video reiterated what the video Did You Know stated about these students are being taught skills for jobs that don't yet exisit, which will use technology that has not yet been invented, in order to solve problems that we don't yet understand or even know exisit.

This video would be effective in beginning conversations regarding what 21st Century looks like. I had not thought about it until after watching this video but today's students prefer reaching a global audience with their communication/writing. Literacy to 21st Century learners means they are able to fluently process visual, aural, and textual elements, and they may even be required to process a combination of these.

This video begins with a question to 431 employers: "Are they (graduates) really ready to work?"
The first sentence of the report: "The future of the U.S. workforce is here and it is woefully ill-prepared.... Nearly two-thirds of employers found high school graduates deficient in written communication, problem solving, critical thinking, professionalism, and work ethic." These were not skill necessary for workers of the Industrial Revolution, but they are necessary skills for workers in the Digital Revolution. Again this video like many of the others offered great questions to encourage conversation among educators. This video is more appropriate for middle and high achool educators as they work towards making curriculum more relevant and applicable to 21st Century learners.

This video featured students from the Robin Hood primary school. It is an effective video to present to educators to illustrate how the 21st Century Learning wants to learn. Students want to be creative, they want rigor and challenge, but most importantly they want to be relevantly engaged in the learning process.

The MacArthur Foundation created this video to encourage educators to reconsider how they are teaching in the 21st Century to the 21st Century learner. These students have a different mentality than students had before the Diigital Revolution. 21st Century students have a "gamer mentality." They constantly want to know how much they are improving, because if they are not getting better at something, than their learning is not engaging or fun. This video argued that formal learning should not necessarily be abandoned, but it does need to be better integrated and coordinated with skills necessary for 21st Century learning.

This video describes how traditional teaching methods are outdated, and explains the skills necessary for our digital native students. In order for teachers to teach 21st Century learners we need to change our thinking, teaching, and ideas of education. We must engage students, meet them in their learning environment and "guide them through the sea of information."

This video was the least effective for me because it seemed to address undergraduate and graduate students, more than K-12 academics. My biggest take away from this video was simply making learning relevant to students. Again students must feel engaged in their learning. They may not be opening a one hundred dollar textbook, but they are reading 2,300 webpages and 1,281 facebook profiles, in a year. During this same year they may only read eight books.