21st Century Skills In Extracurricular Activities

Five Years Ago I started the Falconium Science Journal at TPHS.  We renamed it JOURNYS http://journys.org to be inclusive of schools with other mascots.  In this club, students write articles, illustrate them, edit them, and send them out to a practicing STEM worker for feedback.  The work is published online and on paper several times a year.  In order to perform this task the students build communication and collaboration skills. 

The skills built here aren't tested but they are more applicable to 21st century jobs than the skills that are tested.  The students have employed google docs and dropbox to help them process the large number of articles. 

If one looks at what kids today can do, it's pretty amazing.  However, it seems that they do their best work when working on a task they care about with as few rules as possible.  I think that extracurricular activities offer tremendous opportunity for true project based learning.  Evidently, these people agree:  www.usfirst.org

Upside Down Academy

Upside Down Academy http://upsidedownacademy.org/ is a crowd sourced Khan Academy.  It is a good idea but the execution is poor.  The lessons are virtually all math, leaving out other subjects.  Different links end up taking one to the same place on the site as well.

I have a question about these amateur sites.  How do people choose which video to watch if there is more than one on a topic?  I assume some sort of rating system will help learners choose.  What happens when learners choose videos with questionable pedagogy but that help them get the answers on a test?  For example, one of the Khan Academy videos says something to the effect of "Alkali metals like to lose electrons."  This can generate misconceptions.  Seeing as how reform science educators are intent on stamping out misconceptions I predict a collision between amateur video sites and reform science educators.

Claco.com

Has anyone in the district tried Claco.com (formerly Class Connect)?

Personal Learning Networks - Book Review

Richardson and Mancabelli have made a powerful case that having a personal learning network (PLN) is crucial for people to be successful in the 21st century.  For that reason, students need to be taught how to develop, cultivate, and use a PLN.  As teachers and administrators, we can't help our students do that unless we practice it and model it ourselves.  This has some profound implications for what classroom practice should look like in a connected and always-on world.

They define a personal learning network as a "set of connections to people and resources both offline and online who enrich our learning." (page 2).  While these have existed throughout history, the emergence and proliferation of electronic connections makes global networks possible and even easy.  For students, this can shift the locus of learning outside of the classroom.  Why should they listen to their physics teacher, when they can connect with physics experts throughout the world?

[T]he explosion of learning outside of school walls is too powerful to ignore.... [T]he idea of schooling as we currently know it will struggle to remain relevant in a networked world....  [S]chools need to plug into this vibrant worldwide network of learning to stay relevant and to prepare our children for a vastly different learning landscape.  That means schools will need to embrace a form of learning that is fundamentally different from the one they have known. (page 3)

The authors then develop their argument that personal learning networks are the key to this transition.  They describe the positive effects of PLNs, how to become a networked learner, how to implement a networked classroom, and how to become a networked school.  It is the first part of the book that I found most useful and that I suspect most teachers will as well.  Understanding why and how to develop PLNs are the first steps toward helping students use them effectively.

Chapter 2 (Becoming a Networked Learner) includes instructions for joining Twitter, Diigo, Google Reader, Blogger, and Facebook.  Each of these sections describes the tool, some of the advantages and disadvantages of it, and how to jump right in and start.  I currently use all of these except Facebook for professional learning, and feel like they have certainly helped me make my transition from science teacher to educational technology teacher.  These kind of connections can help any teacher, but are especially relevant for the isolated teacher: someone who doesn't have any colleagues teaching the same class at their own site.

The companion website has links to the resources listed in the book.  I highly recommend this book (especially the first half) to anyone still wondering how technological development is affecting learning processes.  If any of you would like to borrow this thin volume, please let me know.

Flubaroo - Grade Quizzes with Google Forms

Edited to add resources (below)...

Several teachers have asked me about using Flubaroo (www.flubaroo.com).  I've never used it myself, but I am familiar enough with it to describe it.  Flubaroo is an add-in for Google Docs that allows you to have students take a quiz or test using a Google Form and then grades it for you in a Google Spreadsheet.  It is free and doesn't require you to install anything on your computer, so you can use it at school or at home, wherever you can access your Google Apps.  You do need to be reasonably proficient with using a spreadsheet, and you do need to have your students take the quiz on a computer or tablet.  If those restrictions don't bother you, you might give Flubaroo a try.

Here are some resources that might help you get started:

Video tutorials

• www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ60szcUbBE
• www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnY3zV-_UO0
• www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXFRpox7JyM

Help Pages

• Flubaroo User Guide
• Google Help for Creating Forms

Algebra and Flipped Instruction

Here is a link to an article about flipping a math classroom - go ahead and check it out...come on...no on is watching...  http://mankatofreepress.com/local/x699431859/Lesson-at-home-plus-homework-at-school-equals-flipped-math-classroom

21st-Century Fluencies

Here are links to the two presentations that we were to discuss this afternoon before unforeseen difficulties derailed us:

• Understanding the Digital Generation
• Literacy is Not Enough

I would very much like to hear your thoughts about these two perspectives, specifically as they pertain to the following discussion questions:

1. Are these fluencies sufficient for students to be successful in the world of the 21st century?  If not, what do you think has been omitted?
2. How well do you think our current curriculum and instruction prepares students in these fluencies?
3. If you had to pick just one, which one of the five fluencies do you think will be most important for students in the future?

I will add my thoughts to our discussion as well, but I'd like to hear yours first.  Please add your comments to this post.

(If your profile says your name is "Unknown", please maybe fix that, or at least identify yourself in your comment.)