edna.edu.au

New Skills

I am involved in the Connectivism course run by Stephen Downes and George Seimens.  Most of the people taking the course are from a higher education background so it has been a little difficult to find a place that suits me as a primary school teacher.  However the first set of readings has thrown up some interesting resources I have written about the theory over on my uni blog here.  However I thought the reading on Confronting The Challenges of Participatory Culture had an interesting list of skills that will be important to students of the 21st Century.

Skills

• Play
• Performance
• Simulation
• Appropriation
• Multitasking
• Distributed Cognition
• Collective Intelligence
• Judgment
• Transmedia Navigation
• Networking
• Negotiation

Ideally my classroom would look like this

I think the ideal classroom is one where my students would all be connected to a computer and to each other from a young age.  The classroom would be separated into face-to-face spaces and collaborative spaces.  My role would be to monitor the interactions, co-ordinate timetables and help students identify their educational goals.  Each student would have a portion of the day devoted to reading and research on their own, a portion where we collectively look at tasks and some time for small group work.  Each student would have a slightly different reading list for each morning.  They would have things to skim and things to read deeply.  Sometimes they would need to reach agreement sometimes they would need to take opposing views.

Realistically what I can do now

At the moment I'm at the stage in my understanding of moving from a traditional way of looking at learning to a digital classroom and I'm just trying to get stuff online, because over time it provides natural opportunities for exploring the skills listed above.  But even as I write this post I'm thinking of ideas of how I can make do with the current tools.   The Partnership for 21st Century Skills website has resources for assessment and planning to integrate these skills in today's classroom.

What does the ideal classroom look like to you?  What are you doing in your classroom that helps students achieve these skills?

Tags: participatory cultur skills cck08 literature
Posted at 02:15PM Sep 14, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  |