Four absolutely necessary skills and five vital ‘soft skills’

A A Juliani published a paper yesterday entitled ‘21st Century Skills Have Always Been “Needed” Skills, But Now We Need Them More Than Ever’. He points out that these vital skills are not the focus of standardised testing yet so many educational decisions lie on the results of these tests.  He points out that : If schools are meant to prepare students for the real world. Then why doesn’t school look more like the real world?”

These are the skills we focus on at Broughton when many of our classes, both Primary and Secondary, take part in units of work using Guided Inquiry.

However, A A Juliani goes on to discuss the work of Seth Godin

Let’s Stop Calling Them Soft Skills“, in which he describes five categories of skills that we all look for in colleagues, employees, and students–yet, don’t seem to value over other content and standardized skills.

The five skills Seth describes (from http://ajjuliani.com/are-we-waiting-too-long-to-give-students-a-choice-in-their-learning/) are:

Self Control — Once you’ve decided that something is important, are you able to persist in doing it, without letting distractions or bad habits get in the way? Doing things for the long run that you might not feel like doing in the short run.

Productivity — Are you skilled with your instrument? Are you able to use your insights and your commitment to actually move things forward? Getting non-vocational tasks done.

Wisdom — Have you learned things that are difficult to glean from a textbook or a manual? Experience is how we become adults.

Perception — Do you have the experience and the practice to see the world clearly? Seeing things before others have to point them out.

Influence — Have you developed the skills needed to persuade others to take action? Charisma is just one form of this skill.

There is plenty of food for thought here as we plan another year of activities and learning experiences for the children in our care. The content is not all we must teach!

 

Flipped Classroom explained

Educational Technology and Mobile Learning have posted a graphic and two videos to explain what in entailed in ‘flipping’ your classroom. It is one of the best explanations I have seen. As personal technology use expands in our school with the implementation of BYOD, Flipped Classroom is now a possibility.

“Flipped classroom or flipped learning is a methodology, an approach to learning in which technology is employed to reverse the traditional role of classroom time. If in the past, classroom time is spent at lecturing to students , now in a flipped model, this time is utilized to encourage individualized learning and provide one-on-one help to students.”
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Integration of Technology into learning

Terry Heick (Director at TeachThought)discusses what he sees as four stages of integrating technology in learning.

As our school moves across into BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) it will be interesting to see how long it takes before we see an erosion of traditional classroom and curriculum taking place. Deliberating about and managing change is a daily facet of teaching.

This is how Terry Deick describes the last two stages of change in the learning process:

Stage 3: Mobile technology erodes traditional classroom. Truly mobile learners should disrupt non-flexible curriculum.

Mobile learning experiences are inherently unpredictable, requiring varied communication, critical thinking, and aggressive resourcefulness. Standards-based academic work struggles for gravity working against this stage of technology integration.

Stage 4: This final stage of technology implementation necessitates learners to consistently self-direct critical, core components of learning experiences.

Self-direction based on curiosity and play while supported by personalized learning algorithms and the connectivity of authentic networks characterizes this final stage of technology integration. Traditional classroom learning is fully disrupted.

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Digital Fluency

We used to talk about Digital Literacy… Now ‘digital fluency’ goes a step further to include utilising and integrating digital skills into everyday communication, problem solving and learning. How teaching and learning has changed! Now the teacher must also ensure he or she is constantly upskilling to the point of ‘fluency’ then changing pedagogues in order to be relevant.

Educators: Social Networking sites for your PLN

So much change in so many areas makes it hard to keep abreast with educational research and developments. A well connected teacher has access to many people and new ideas with similar interests to their own.
This site offers access to selected social networks so that teachers can link to stay informed or to share their own expertise in an area of education.
This is Part 2 in a series. The Comprehesive Guide to The Use of Social Networking in Education Part 1 gives a clear explanation of social networking as it applies to education but this site – Part 2 – delves deeper

Some of the principal benefits of these networks is that they help you grow professionally and expand your knowledge base to include new ideas and concepts. To be a successful educator, we need to constantly engage in discussions and participate in the various communities of practice and PLNs available online.

E-Portfolios for reflection and goal setting

Traditionally schools have collected student work samples to store physical examples of accomplishment and compare individual achievement over a period of time. E-Portfolios have so much more potential. They can be used to “help students find purpose and passion through reflection and goal-setting” as they develop their own record of learning. Dr Helen Barrett explains how it is possible to incorporate the use of digital tools in learning to achieve this goal.

Agents of change – ‘Play’ in education

Northern Beaches Christian school is leading the way in changing the model of education. Common learning spaces and student selected activities support curricular work. Videos of the Principal’s vision, students at work and teacher’s perspectives can be seen in this link from the playDUcation blog.

Global Changes in Education: the teacher’s role

This video “addresses the forces of change that are causing educators globally to rethink what education for today’s students should involve.”
Students are moving from learning about an historical body of information to becoming life-long learners manipulating information to solve and innovate in inquiry projects.
How do we help them to become capable of managing their own learning and to be learning forever? Information literacy and digital literacy is the key and this is the special role of Teacher Librarians as they team with classroom teachers in the school.

Year 10 students present their Guided Inquiry work at TL Network meeting

On Friday 28 October five of our Year 10 students who have been studying “Issues in Australian Society” presented their work in the IRC Theatrette. They were sharing their personal perspective of the use of Guided Inquiry as a research process for their unit of work in Commerce. The occasion was a Network Meeting of Teacher Librarians of the Association of Independent Schools (AIS) and over twenty Teacher Librarians from across Sydney were in attendance .

The students described the Information Search Process and examples of the scaffolds they used to enable them to delve deeply into their selected topic areas. James then gave a four minute presentation of the answer to his self constructed question “Should nuclear energy, keeping in mind financial and environmental impacts,be implemented as a major source of electricity over the current major sources of electricity in Australia?”.

The students had used a wiki for storage of their work and to share their learning and this included peer review at the end of the unit of work.

TED talk by inspirational School Librarian, Dr Joyce Valenza

Dr Joyce Valenza is well known worldwide by Teacher Librarians for her innovative use of technology in schools and her contributions to the development of Web2.0 tools integrated into school research practice. She regularly visits Australia to share at our professional development conferences.