At the start of the academic year I encouraged students to consider 21st century reality in terms of both the professional and the personal sphere. We outlined how life today differs from the reality of say 3 or 4 decades ago, and how in the coming decades it will likely continue to evolve or radically change.
Then through a class discussion we extracted some of the skills we felt were an important part of the toolkit of today’s teenager. We made a list of these skills on the board and briefly discussed each of them.
Students were then invited to consider how we can work on developing these skills through our Computing lessons. We discussed points students brought up from their school experience to get things started, and then students were asked to list their own ideas on a mentimeter.
On the mentimeter, students are asked to name a skill they aimed to improve and at least one type of activity we can do to work on that skill. At this point students worked in pairs.
Finally we briefly discussed some of these ideas and decided which we can in fact incorporate in our lessons this year….basically we felt all ideas were valid.
After the lesson, I went over the students’ points on the mentimeter and compiled their ideas to set up the board in the photo.
Why the board is important
For the students, this board is a reminder of the skills we’ve discussed.
For me it’s just as useful. It is both a little trove of ideas and, more importantly, a gauge against which I measure my lesson plans and the degree to which they nurture 21st century skills…If my lesson doesn’t tick at least one of the boxes, normally it’s back to the drawing board and some more rethinking!
class4d21st.school.blog 