Walking the Walk

For the past 6 months I have been talking the talk about 21st Century learning and Web 2.0 skills - and how important it is to integrate these into ALL classrooms. Now it is time to model what I have been promoting. This semester, I am teaching a 21st Century Learning class following a model developed by the Graham School in Columbus, Ohio.

The course has 6 core components. The first is Community. Our students are involved in social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. They create profiles and share information with people from our school and throughout the world. We will start with an emphasis on building a community within our classroom. We will be using blogs, wordle and animoto to share who we are with each other. A second focus is on Collaboration. Students will use Google Apps and Moodle to work together on planning and implementing Service Learning Projects that will benefit our school or other schools in our district. Examples of projects might be creating a Wiki page of review games and resources for 2nd graders to use or helping to assemble board games to be used to review for assessments at the elementary school. Research is an important 21st Century skill and students will be creating their own research projects, then utilizing Gale Data bases and Advanced Search Functions in Google to gather information. They will also be able to use Freemind and other mindmapping software to begin to organize their information and Google Docs to publish their finished work. To develop 21st Century Communication skills, we will use Moodle to learn how to follow a discussion on a threaded blog and conduct a live chat. They will also use Twitter and Delicous to share information and create a group in Facebook to plan a service project. We will spend time talking about different levels of internet communication, more formal and more casual, along with professional and private internet presences. Technology use is interwoven throughout the course. We will have access to video conferencing equipment and will be reaching out beyond our classroom to find educational partners. The students will also look at positive ways of using podcasting, videocasting and texting in the world of education.

The course is designed to be conducted without textbooks or hard copy student materials. All lessons, assignments and assessments will be done virtually using Google Sites, Moodle and Google Docs. Instruction will be done using a mix of live classroom presentations and videocasts. Students will be evaluated using a rubric based grading system and performance based assessments. They will receive feedback through real time comments posted on the discussion threads or added to their shared Google Docs work.

I am excited about the opportunity to teach this model class. I hope that I will be able to share what I have learned with not only my students, but my peers. It will be an interesting 18 weeks!

Follow how the class it doing by visiting our website http://sites.google.com/site/fhs21c/