Session 2 at the Mindlab: 21st Century Skills for the DCL course and Reflective Practice and Key Competencies in Leading for the LDC course

Hi Everyone,
                Had a fantastic time yesterday, collaborating with everyone. I arrived a little early and had the dilemma of where should I sit? What is the etiquette of seating in a collaborative world? On one hand I wanted to get to know the people I sat with last week a little more...but on the other hand I wanted to meet new people and learn as much as I could on these collaboration sessions. I took the plunge, hoping I wouldn't offend and I sat on a new table with a new colleague. Within a short space of time we were joined by another 2 other ladies. We all seemed to bond really quickly and confessed to our thought of being overwhelmed and a little scared of keeping up with everything that was happening. It feels like there is so much going on, looking at professional readings and videos, keeping up with our blog, trialing new things we have to learn, getting to grips with new apps and new ideas, keeping up to date with our task list 'check off' and preparing for our assessments...the list seems to go on and on...in a positive, I might add, but daunting way.

The title of the session this week was all about -

21st Century Skills for the DCL course
and
Reflective Practice and Key Competencies in Leading for the LDC course

...It all gets a bit confusing as it is so new. What I do know is that the DCL course the first assessment is due in Monday 30th November ...eeeekkkk. It's ok tho, I have an idea!

Today discussion centered around - What are the most important skills of the 21st century?

and how well do our thoughts align with the ITL research results:

1. Collaboration
2. Knowledge construction
3. Self-regulation
4. Real-world problems/innovations
5. ICT for learning
6. Skilled communication

I will reflect and talk about this later in the week...when I have done some more homework/professional reading and gathered my thoughts more fully. Here is a wordcloud I made to show some of the skills I think students need to be equipped with for their future. You can make a wordcloud yourself at the following sites: www.tagul.com or wordle.net

So then the fun bit.... We then had a brief tutorial on 21st century skills/film making and were then set to task. We had to make a short video to tackle the question and difference between students being passive consumers of ICT and active users and designers of ICT.

We chose to focus on the use of ICT to support knowledge construction....enter our video...I shall set the scenario as we kind of run out of time at the end to add and edit a brief narrative to the video.

So, 

Act One.... Teaching being a control freak of ICT, students not using ICT to support knowledge construction, talk and chalk/industrial learning style, students being naughty...especially me lol, teacher trying to teach 'angles' but no relevance to student interest and their lives etc.

Act Two... Staff room chat and one very stressed teacher, shares and collaborate with others to come up with a better way to teach the topic

Act Three...Conclusion - following lesson, students allowed to use their skateboards to demonstrate angles e.g doing a 360, IPad used by one student to video and use an app that measures, interpret and analyse results, student even teaches teacher how to do do a 360 on a skateboard. Engaged, interesting fun lesson and students using ICT to support knowledge construction.

View Video here         https://app.themindlab.com/media/15151/view

Hope you enjoy :) 

Thanks to Kim, Karima and Manmeet that we so much fun and I learnt how to use imovie :)