21st Century Learners and Technology Integration in the Classroom

This week's food for thought was a consideration of the nature of the 21st Century Leaner (who are students will be and what will be important for their learning) and how technology could be applied to effectively teaching this and future generations of the digital age.

A brief summary of what I learned about 21st Century Learners;

- It is critical to teach and develop skills in the following areas in order that students may be successful not only in school but in their adult lives and future careers as well;

• Literacy (ability to understand and manipulate) when it comes to Information, Technology, and Media
• Critical thinking, innovation, and self-directed learning
• Life and Career Skills (which include the above mentioned skills as well as interpersonal skills, accountability, flexibility, time and resource management, etc.)

- That all of these skills can and must be taught through the filter of the core subjects, which are also vital parts of student skill and knowledge development

- That 21st Century Learners must understand the relevence of what they are learning and be given opportunities to practice applying what is taught

- That the skills and information learned in the classroom must be recognized as tools used to prepare students for the social, political, and economic realities they will encounter

I have also been considering the incredible saturation of modern society by technology; obviously technology is a very important aspect  of daily life, considering its huge prevalence and influence. It is crazy to try and ignore such an important part of culture within the classroom, particularly when technology has the potential for excellent classroom application. It has been stressed that students need to feel their education has practical relevence and also that education needs to be engaging if students are going to take an interest in their learning; incorporating technology in the classroom can solve both of these issues. Technology can be fun and interactive, and students will learn and develop important skills for use outside of school.

Lastly, I want to mention that it is a good idea for teachers to stay up to date with new technology. Not only is it going to make lessons that much more applicable to the present, but lots of new technology is just simply more efficient for teaching than the old, and that is WHY it is developed in the first place. One of the assigned articles (Presenting Effective Presentations With Visual Aids,  http://www.osha.gov/doc/outreachtraining/htmlfiles/traintec.html) actually made me think of this. While the article was useful in stressing the importance of using visual information in presentations to make information more comprehensible and memorable, the technology discussed in the article as presentation supplements really dated the article. It mentioned flip charts, VHS tapes, slide projections and transparency projectors; it also discussed issues with these technologies that are eliminated in more modern presentation technologies such as a powerpoint presentations. Such issues included trying to transition smoothly between sheets of transparencies, the time and effort needed to produce slides, the unwieldiness of transporting large posters or charts, and the expenses involved in producing all of these types of presentation supplements. Modern presentation software such as powerpoint can transition smoothly between "slides" at the click of a mouse (or even automatically if a timer is set), requires only as much time to create as it takes to select what you would like to include, can be transported on a cd, USB drive or simply accessed through email, and cost nothing to produce.

A summary of these ideas is available at the link below, in a presentation I created using Prezi (another handy presentation software, and my first attempt using it):

What is Effective Technology Integration for 21st Century Learners? on Prezi

P.S.
After this first encounter with Prezi, I have to say I did not find it to be a very flexible or user-friendly program. I felt it was very limiting in terms of what I was able to do with my presentation and what it looks like. Next time I would preferentially use Power Point or Google Documents.