Journal+for+Week+4

This weeks video and readings provided great insight to 21st century learning. I really liked the video for two reasons; first it included pictures of what a 21st century classroom should look like, secondly, it reminded me of the need to develop a more cooperative classroom. It showed how most of our classrooms look like the 1960's. It showed examples of the classroom environment we should be designing so that our students can become 21st century learners. On our technology team our classrooms look like the 1960's. I am lucky enough to have tables, but my colleagues do not. I have students sitting at tables, but in my regular class we don't do too much cooperative learning because the students are not well enough behaved. Hopefully some of our 21st century grant money will allow our teachers to get tables along with equipment for them to use.

Secondly, it reminded me of the need to teach students competition, cooperation, and collaboration. In regards to competition my honors students are very competitive and work hard to improve thier work to be the best reader or writer in class. I see the need to instill this in my regular students and I am trying to do this through wiki pages. I hope when my students see other students responses they will improve their own writing. Here is one wiki page I have started in language arts: http://red5-7.wikispaces.com/

When I first starting teaching cooperative learning and team building were very important. As high standards and assessment testing have become more important these have gone by the wayside. Through the video I was reminded of the need to start doing team building again so that my misbehaved classes can learn the skills to work together in cooperative groups.

Finally, collaboration. The readings provided several international collaborative projects that looked very interesting. One was on veterns of WWII project between the Dutch and Canadians. I would love to participate in this because we read //Number the Stars// by Lois Lowry and have been trying to work with epals over the last two years, but have gotten no response. Hopefully my coach can get me involved in an international collaborative project. Two other links involved children's literature. I am going to plan a unit where the students blog or write to authors through this link: []. The other link gave me some good ideas for web and wiki pages I hope to use as resources to update my current web page. [].

Overall, this weeks readings gave me lots of good hands on ideas and reminded me of the need to work on team building in my classroom. In regards to creating the student needs assessment we enjoyed learning how survey monkey worked and think our students will enjoy doing the survey on line compared to the typed one we are sending home. Can't wait to see the results.