21st Century Pedagogy

 

Online learning is ideal for engaging students in higher order thinking skills, if prepared and guided appropriately, as there are many tools available for students to engage in collaboration, sharing, publishing. thinking, creativity and design. 

The above diagram illustrates the retention rate for students based on a variety of teaching strategies. The retention rate for information given during a lecture averages 5% - whereas the retention rate when students are actively involved in discussing, doing, using and teaching.

The diagram below attempts to describe all the components of 21st century pedagogy. Very few, if any, of these strategies are static. All require some level of interactivity, communication or reflection. As a teacher, this has significant implications for how we teach the young people in our classes. 

ACTIVITY FOUR: have a look at each of the diagrams provided and reflect on their implications for teaching, planning for the classroom and what types of strategies need to be regularly incorporated into all lessons. In your blog comment for this post make a note of some of them implications you can think of for you and your lesson planning.

WORDLE - a fun online resource for students! Vocab, terms, key words etc...

Wordle is a fun, creative online tool for students and staff to use.

There are MANY uses for this fun word tool - 


A "Wordle" enables you to see how frequently words appear in a given text, or see the relationship between a column of words and a column of numbers. You can tweak your word "clouds" with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.


The size of a word is proportional to the quantity associated with that word, which, in the case of free text, is the word count. For instance, if your text consists of the words "apple apple apple banana banana papaya", then "banana" will appear in a font size twice that of "papaya", and "apple" will appear in a font size 3/2 as large as "banana".

43 Uses for Wordle -Click on this link and go to this slideshow - there are many examples of how Wordle can be used.


Wordle can be used by teachers as a printout for students to use, it can be used online, it can be saved as an image ... students can create their own Wordles.


Have a look at this interesting use of Wordle - the entire inaugauration speech of Obama has been turned into a Wordle cloud. It is publish alongside previous president Bush's speech. This is an easy and visual way to compare the content of 2 important speakers and their speeches. 


23 Classroom ideas for the use of Wordle is an interesting site to look at - and it has a sample of the author's own Wordle for their CV.


ACTIVITY TWO - After visiting the links embedded in this post, make your own Wordle. Leave a comment to this post, including a reflection about how you could use this tool in your class. (you could even add the link to the Wordle you created!)