New Cultures for Learning

In March, I had the privilege to attend and present at the Show-Me Professional Development Conference in Columbia.  I was again reminded of all of the great things that we as a building and district are doing based on the feedback that we received after our presentation.  However, we still have some work left to do.  I had the opportunity to attend three sessions given by Alan November who authored “Who Owns the Learning.”  I took away some great information from these sessions that really required me to reflect about what was presented.

In the first session, Mr. November (no, not Derek Jeter) made the statement that the role of the teacher in the 21st century is to show students how they themselves learn.   While some may disagree with this statement, I believe that if we think about it more in depth, it makes perfect sense.  Before the technological advances of the last 5-10 years, students attended school needing the information that teachers provided them in their classes.  However, today students have immediate access to any piece of information that they want or need.  Teachers are still a vital component of the educational system, the role they perform now just needs to be redefined.  One of these roles needs to be the lead learner of classroom. Mr. November went on to share what he believes are the three pillars to digital literacy to improve the critical thinking process.  First, is to effectively find information on the internet.  Second, is to effectively harness, synthesize and store the information.  And lastly, the need for students to connect and collaborate with others about the information they have found or need.  While each of these pillars is important, I believe the one that teachers can begin doing now is the third one.  Hopefully throughout these past two school years you have taken the time to develop and grow a PLN via twitter or other means.  Modeling for students that you reach out to others to offer and elicit information will help them see the need to do the same with new information they have learned. Another important skill that students need to be taught is who is controlling the information on the internet.  If you ask a student where they get most of their web based information from, they’ll more than likely tell you from one few links that shows up on their Google search.  The Wayback Machine at archive.org will allow students access to a websites history.  This site demonstrates for students how the internet is being stored daily and has been dating back to 1996.  Another resource that gives students the information about who owns particular websites is the Whois Database at Network Solutions.  These are just a few of the resources that are available for students to determine the legitimacy of information they come across while searching online. Even though instructional practices and procedures are changing, teachers in the 21st century classrooms are just as significant and needed more than ever.  The only difference between 2014 and 1914 is that the role of teacher is different.

RESOURCES 21st Century Learning -- a Deep Dive into the Future of Education (Video) http://novemberlearning.com/