Module 7 Activity 11: 21st Century Learning Environment

It must be recognized that our students are immersed in technology in every aspects of their lives. This being the case, the education of these learners can be no different, so the learning environment has to be designed to allow for this process to be successful. Therefore, 21st century learning requires a technology strategy that enables our students to be engaged and connected with the wide range of available resources that they need to succeed and these include teachers, parents, experts and the wider community.

Learning environment in the connected classroom provides the platform that schools need to engage the digital generation, differentiate instruction, teach critical 21^st century skills and improve students’ learning experience. It also provides an avenue for teachers and students to connect with the digital resources and tools they need to collaborate within the classroom with peers and across boundaries around the world.

 

The tools help provide schools and teachers with the necessary technology and understanding to transform the traditional classroom into an environment in which students can be nurtured and prepared for life in the digital age. New technologies and teacher-focused professional learning enables teachers to more effectively engage students and individualized instruction with easy access to rich and diverse digital content. It is therefore necessary for the right environment be provided that is conducive to motivate our learners to enhance and develop the 21st century learning skills that are critical for today's world and beyond.

 

Module 7 Activity 10: Sharing (publishing) online

Publishing of the end product of any problem-solving project is an integral part of 21st century learning experience. It is important for learners to share their findings with wider audiences having experienced the process of creating knowledge that is essential to to real life issues. The activities allowed me to explore several tools that are relevant to the publishing and sharing process. These include blogs, wikis, photo story, movie maker and podcasts.

Module 7 Activity 9: Learning and collaboration online

The value of collaboration tools for learning in a connected classroom is immeasurable. They provide a place for learners to create, share, and discuss content and projects without the bottlenecks that hold them back. These tools create an environment that encourages discussions, collects feedback, and shares answers with comments and likes, while making it easy to brainstorm remotely, continue conversations asynchronously and reducing wasteful meetings. They provide for diverse learning environments for students with distinct, often overlapping, motivations and learning practices.

Module 7 Activity 8: Communicating online

Both categories of communication online (synchronous and asynchronous) are very important and useful to learning in a connected classroom. It enhances the learners ability to collaborate in a meaningful way in or outside the classroom during formal or informal sessions. They also provide an avenue for collaboration to take place across boundaries using a wide range of communication tools; FaceBook, Wiki,Blogs YouTube, Twitter, etc.

In addition to the use of communication tools in the connected classroom, there are a myriad of digital webtools that are available for digital storytelling where the learners are motivated to apply, contextualize, visualize and personalize the language they learn and create imaginative stories for sharing. It must be noted that inspite of the many benefits of communication tools in the connected classroom, participating in the activity drove home the point of the difficulties learners could experience to sychronize due to poor time mangement, incompatible work schedules and lack of internet connection, especially during synchronous communication on line.

Module 7 Activity 7: Learning through Social Media

Social media learning takes the form of interaction which is a highly effective form of active learning. Involving social media in the learning/teaching process opens new avenues of communications between students, their peers, teachers, experts and the wider communities throughout the world. Students benefit especially from these extra communication channels that provide opportunities for them to process information and contibute meaningfully to class/group discussions at their own pace. They are able to ask quetions of their peers and teachers in a relaxed, comfortable environment without being intimidated. In using social media the classroom is expanded to a 24/7 experience where accessibility to all is dramatically increased.

However, the use of social media is not without some concerns. There are some measures of uncertainty in using social media since it is subjected to continuous change which have implications for a required structure to fit into the exact learning need. There is also the concern of managing a social network site since when one logs into a site there are numerous invitations to log on to other similar sites which makes it difficult to manage and eventually becomes cumbersome. We are also aware that integral to the the learning process is the ability to track students performance and measure progress. At present, measuring tools for the use of social media are limited. However, despite thes concerns, the benefits of social media in learning far outweigh the drawbacks.

Module 7 Activity 6: Real world collaboration

I am being enlightened by the topic of real world collaboration while reading the range of articles and participating in the different activities.  Problem solving in real-world contexts is one of the key elements of 21st century education and engaged learning, and this is one of the major issues that appealed most to me. Students are more motivated when they’re given work that is realistic and that reflects something they might actually have to do in the real world, beyond school doors and this shows that authenticity and relevancy is critical to problem solving.