Welcome to a series of posts dedicated to 21st skills and assessment. In this post, I wish to elaborate on Critical Thinking. The idea of critical thinking is very important. In fact , I believe that when critical thinking begins... real learning has been sparked! Now that is exciting. I want to provide you some great…
Critical thinking is one of the most important aspects of Education in the 21 century. Developing critical thinking brings many opportunities for students to become free thinkers that allow them to make appropriate decisions for their benefit and for the collective wellness, in addition to opening their minds to create new things important to humanity. Thas is why developing critical thinking in classes is essential for education, this article shows some activities that can be useful to develop critical thinking.
"Here are two interesting apps we reviewed in the past and which you can use with your students to create simulated TV shows. Students will get to experiment with a wide variety of multimedia materials, collaborate together, design characters, pick out themes and backgrounds, draw cartoons, and when they are done they can share and leave feedback on each other’s creation ..."
"What are 21st Century skills? Learn more about all 12 skills here: Critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication, information literacy, media literacy, technology literacy, flexibility, leadership, initiative, productivity, and social skills ..."
"Here’s a story I don’t tell very often. I spent the better part of 8th grade being uninterested in school – although school is all I did. Let me explain. I was present, I did my homework, studied very hard for my finals, yet I did not raise my hand to answer questions in class ..."
"The popular timeline creation tool Hstry is now Sutori. This is not only a change of name but is also a change of focus, it is a 'move away from the less flexible terminology of timeline into the story or presentation space’ ..."
Sutori is an excellent tool for use in the history classroom. It provides a more engaging method of creating timelines in history classes. It is also able to be used in the English classroom as a method of creating a plot map when conducting a novel study or while reading a play (Shakespeare's Hamlet would be a great example, with so many interwoven plot lines and characters). Not only is the teacher able to create a Sutori timeline to assist student learning for a self-paced interactive learning activity, but students can create their own Sutori timelines and presentations. This would be an ideal collaborative learning tool where the class is divided into groups and each group creates their own Sutori based on a particular aspect of the unit for other groups to use. There could be space provided at the end of the timeline or presentation for the students to give feedback to the creators. This ultimately allows students to analyse and evaluate sources for reliability and relevance before including them in the Sutori, to be creative, collaborative, use critical thinking and engage in communication with their peers. This would be an example of redefinition under the SAMR model (Puentedura, 2006).
"Google Docs is the go-to document creation tool for both teams and individuals. It offers advanced collaboration and editing tools for free and without any ..."
"Collaboration helps to develop many of the key skills that will be required of students for their future success. Students can develop many of these so-called “soft skills,” or Essential Employability Skills, by engaging in group work and other forms of collaboration (Ontario Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development 2005)."
Diana Clark is an experienced high school educator with great ideas for teamwork and collaboration. Here are 8 of her favorite online collaboration tools.
The online interactive whiteboard app where people share and learn without boundaries. Join from any device and collaborate in real-time both visually and audibly. Turn ideas into understanding with Explain Everything.
"Collaboration and team work are at the centre of meaningful learning experiences both inside and outside classroom walls. Luckily technology provides us with various tools and applications that support and enhance collaborative realtime work ..."
Educators are attempting classroom redesign to make school spaces more conducive to the different ways students learn and the way teachers want to teach.
"The web is a treasure trove of interesting resources to use for a variety of educational purposes. To leverage the educational potential of the web and be able to make the best of it in your instruction, you need to be equipped with tools that will enable you to curate, save and share the content you come across online ..."
"Educational technology: it’s the hottest movement out there in education, and has been for some time. In fact, there seems to be a rather non-discriminating admiration for anything edtech among many teachers today. You can’t open …"
There are some great and different web tools here that a teacher could use within the classrooms or with their colleagues. Furthermore, the fact these tools can be used online and from home promote ICT within the classroom as well as building a collaborative environment.
Madmagz is a neat platform for collaboratively creating online magazines. Madmagz provides you with a magazine template that lets you use images and text that you can edit alone or with invited collaborators. Unlike some other collaborative writing platforms, the original creator of the magazine has to approve or verify submissions from collaborators.
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