21 Skills for 21st Century Teachers

Photo by HannaPritchett on Flickr

Monday was my first day back with students.  My students were teachers in the Mount Vernon School District.  A group of dedicated teachers took a day out of their summer vacation to learn more about how to embed meaningful technology into their teaching.  For this class, the focus was on teaching skills.  Here are a few of the highlights.

Collaboration: I created the class in Edmodo so we had plenty of opportunities to explore the opportunities of using this tool both with teacher groups and with students.  We explored using the assignment, poll, and link tools.  We have a district domain. MountVernon.Edmodo.com if you would like to join in the collaboration, please email me and ask for your school code.  

Digital Citizenship: I shared a link to a collection of resources and information that I have gathered on Teaching Digital Citizenship.  

Productivity: Teachers worked in pairs to learn a tip or trick to use with Microsoft Office products.  They then shared their tips with the rest of the class.  Here are a few of the tips and tricks.

Presentation: We explored the idea of the Flipped Classroom.  Our group was diverse.  Kindergarten to High School, but all agreed, that there were pieces of the flipped classroom that would work in their classroom.  An example from Kindergarten was to create a video to share with parents and students how to correctly form letters.  5th grade teachers mentioned having students explain “The forgiving method of division.”  One teacher expressed that videos would need to be done in Spanish as well.  It was suggested that you could have a Spanish speaking student create the Spanish version.  We looked at the free tool, Screen-Cast-O-Matic for creating tutorials.

Assessment: Several tools were explored for creating online assessments.  A favorite because of ease of use, was Google Forms.  Others we looked at were Quiz Builder in Discovery Education Streaming, Socrative (which turns cell phones into classroom response devices), ExamView, Edmodo and PhotoPeach.

Creation: We looked at several fun creation tools such as BigHugeLabs.com, Animoto.com, BeFunky.com and Thinglink.com.   We explored the idea of Mashups, taking several different tools and creating one product.  Thinglink.com was new to most and has some interesting possibilities.

Communication: Everyone was happy to have some time to work on their school web page.  We learned how to log in, and add content.  The most exciting thing was for teachers to see how they could embed some of the created content we had already talked about.

Curation:  And rounding out the day we looked at tools for curating content.  I shared how I use Diigo and Google Reader.  We looked at Google News and talked about RSS feeds. I shared several great websites to follow and showed how to add the feeds to your reader.  

What a great day.  A bit overwhelming, but it was exciting to see such openess for trying new things.  

If you are interested in going through this course on Edmodo, you can email me to ask for a group code.  You can also take a peek at the public page where I have shared many of the resources we talked about.   Pin It Now!