21st Century Tools for Teaching-People and Learners

Always put yourself in your students’ shoes. What do they need in order to stay interested and to keep learning?

What do they need in order to stay interested and to keep learning?

Online classes can be extremely exciting or extremely dull, depending upon how they are designed. If you simply migrate paper to digital, it will kill your students’ love of learning quicker than Apple comes out with new versions of iPhones.

But done right, it can be the most exciting way to learn that your students have ever experienced.

Think about what the Internet offers that traditional classes don’t, and build on those features:

- Information at their fingertips

- Learn anytime/anywhere

- Communication/collaboration with anyone in the world (global projects, talk to experts, use their desire for social interactions to gain more in-depth learning)

- Learn at their own pace

-Interact and manipulate information in exciting ways

- Innovate, create, produce, build knowledge and share it with a global audience

- Students more empowered than ever before to direct their own learning, find information they are passionate about, follow their curiosity, and interact with new kinds of information

- Plagiarism and cheating opportunities will encourage you to get creative with your assessments. Students will need to do more than just pass tests. You can have them solve problems, teach a concept to another student, build a learning artifact (video, podcast, game, etc.) that you can add to your content library, or collaborate with others to produce something original.

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Blogging is a simple way for students and teachers to stay connected. In an effort to create a digital classroom, many teachers work hard to answer questions, create homework assignments, and take much of the learning experience online by harnessing the power of blogs.