There are lots of motivating videos about 21st Century Learning, such as “Engage Me.”  There are certainly more flashy ones, but I like this one because it features elementary-aged students.

I am now on a quest to discover the answer to my question.  My first step is to think about some key ingredients in a  21st Century Learning environment.  Here are 5 that I’ve adopted so far.

1) NETS: All curriculum should be framed by the National Educational Technology Standards.  The 6 strands are: Creativity and Innovation; Communication and Collaboration; Research and Information Literacy; Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making; Digital Citizenship; and Technology Operations and Concepts.  All content areas should be taught within the context of these standards.  The NETS-S 2007 Implementation Wiki contains some great resources for the application of these standards.

2) Student-centered learning: Teachers need to gain a new vision of their role in the classroom as they shift their focus from “teaching” to becoming  “facilitators of learning.”  Students need to take greater responsibility for their learning and become more self-directed.  This will only happen as they have greater freedom to make choices within their learning environment.

3) Differentiation: This is really just an extension of student-centered learning.  We have long known that students learn at different rates in different ways.  The use of technology tools is a fabulous way to provide differentiation.  Tracey Hall’s research about Differentiated Instruction provides a very informative overview, including a diagram of the learning/planning cycle.

4) Problem-based learning: In this type of learning, students explore possible solutions to “real” problems and work collaboratively to determine the best solution.  Through this process students learn “how to learn” by focusing on authentic issues.  This approach is very student-centered and open-ended.  IMSA’s PBLNetwork is a fabulous resource.

5) Online collaboration: To establish a 21st Century learning model, it’s important to base it on the foundational understanding that classrooms today are not contained within 4 walls or even within a single building.  Today our classroom is the entire world, and we can learn from and with people around the globe.  Cultivating collaborative partners from various corners of the world will broaden our educational resources and will help our students learn what it means to be a global citizen.

I’m still searching for a road map! Obviously Alan November has done ground-breaking work in this area, but his resources are all commercial products.  By far the best “grass roots” resource that I have seen is Kim Cofino’s work at the International School Bangkok.  The ISB 21st Century Literacy wiki sets forth a clear vision of the 21st Century Learner and a framework for planning instruction.  An ability to translate theory into practice is crucial!  I hope that as my district moves further into this ambitious technology roll-out plan, that our leaders will develop a similar framework that will provide structure and guidance in empowering our teachers to make the pedagogical shift necessary to prepare our students for the unknown world that awaits them.  These are exciting times to be an educator!

Then I tested the PDF option with a student project:

There are so many ways this could be used in school, not only for Language Arts, but in every content area.  Primary teachers could use it to create class books, and older students could create individual books.  Teachers could create an end of the year memory book for their class.  Content can be uploaded from your computer, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Bebo, Photobucket, and more.  Books can be designated as public or private.  Each book has its own URL, and embeddable code is also provided.

Recommendations:

• Make sure you have Flash 10 loaded.
• Don’t allow students to go to the Myebook main page.  People post a variety of books, and some content is definitely not suitable for students.  I plan to share and manage by using the URL links.
• For most elementary students, the easiest option would be to have them create their content in Word or PowerPoint and save as a PDF.  Then you upload the PDF, and the ebook is quickly created.  Older students would enjoy creating their own and customizing.