Week 2 - Blog Posting #4 –21st Century Skills & Lifelong Learning
As a high school art teacher, I am truly concerned about the educational value in what my students are learning, if they can actually use what they have learned, if it is truly relevant to their lives, and if these are real skills that contribute to life-long learning. Travel, for instance has been an important part of learning about other cultures for myself and my students. We have traveled recently to Spain and will be traveling in the spring to Italy. In this photo, a native guide from the area speaks in accented English about a beautiful palace we are visiting. She was an excellent example to myself and my students of how a native can teach through an immigrant language.
As I enter a new school year, armed with exciting ways to enhance my teaching through Web 2.0 technology, I have to question how much of what I am teaching is meeting my students’ 21st Century needs. Can these digital natives learn properly from a digital immigrant? According to Marc Prensky, in Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, maybe not. It’s very serious, because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language. (Prensky 2001) We do face big hurdles in making connections with our students anyway. There are the usual generation gaps between many teachers and their students due to age differences, differences in interests and pre-existing knowledge, gaps in opportunities and lack of access to technology. Most of us, working towards updating our ability to teach skills that support these new literacies, recognize the seriousness of these hurdles and are working to close the gap in our teaching.
I was also impressed by a Learning and Innovation Skills list, highlighted on the 21st Century Skills webpage, Teaching for Artistic Behavior, http://teachingforartisticbehavior.org/21st%25252520Century%25252520Skills.html. If you access this page you will find a an exceptionally complete list of skills related to visual art that I plan to use on a daily basis in my classes this year. These skills are grounded in Bloom’s Taxonomy and support our constant defense of the arts as a valuable part of a well-rounded education for all students at all levels. I am of course, particularly interested in how the technological aspects of the list can be applied to my painting, drawing, and art survey classes compared to how my classes have functioned in the past. The “art making” and the research within the digital world has been easy. I am now looking to apply more inquiry, communication, and collaboration to my students through a more thorough investigation of 21st Century Skills. I think that this site, in general supports many of the reasons that I feel we need to educate ourselves about these new technologies, and how we will actually apply them to teaching this new literacy.
The video from Teacher Tube below has some good, basic reminders for reasons to encourage and teach collaboration within all our classrooms. These global connections are some of the most important reasons for teaching from a new point of view and for embracing what our students already know - that 21st Century skills are here to stay and that we need to get on board as teachers if we are going to properly educate our students.
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