Assignment #9- School 2.0 Part 1: 21st Century Skills

I enjoyed listening to Kevin Honeycutt's podcast. He made a lot of good points and had some great ideas. Being a science teacher, I especially appreciated Kevin's comments on brain development and how the pre-frontal cortex is one of the last components to develop and subsequently "executive functioning" is not fully developed in teens, thus making adult involvement and guidance essential. I also really liked his warning to students about not posting on-line anything they would be embarrassed about should it resurface years later since college scholarship committees and potential employers may come across it on the Internet. I don't think students fully understand the repercussions of what they post on myspace and facebook.

As for a project similar to the collaborative projects Kevin describes, I like the idea of using 3 classrooms where one designs a plan, or a blueprint, for a particular component of an object (like an airplane or car), another classroom designs another component, and the third classroom actually builds it. I could see using this at the middle school where we conveniently have 3 science teachers on different teams at the same grade level. Each teacher could have their classes focus on one aspect of the project and each class would be paired up with a class from another team. They would be 5 final objects constructed, and we could even have a competition to see which model is the best in regards to speed, construction, etc. This would be a great project to do during our measurement unit where students learn about length, mass, volume, density, etc.

I also think it would be neat to give students a pretend patient with an unknown illness during the human body unit and group them with students from other classes who are given the same patient story. The students would have to work together virtually to research and post their finding and ideas on either a wiki or blog in an attempt to diagnose the patient.

I completely agree with Kevin's view that we need to allow students to work collaboratively, make more decisions, and use technology while learning. Otherwise, we will not only lose their interest and focus, but we will not be preparing them to live in the 21st century. I'm sure a goal of all teachers is to prepare students to be healthy, productive members of society, and leaving out technology in instruction is certainly a hindrance to such development.