Is there a connection between 21st century skills and lifelong learning. At first for me the connection was not clear, but then I read Krinsten's blog on this subject and the connection hit me. Kristen said in her blog, "
I didn’t finally start to enjoy school until my first five minutes at Full Sail" She goes on to say that it was this first experience that brought her back to the gradated program. So a great educational experience created a lifelong learner out of someone that might not have become a lifelong learner without it. So this got me thinking about the experiences of the digital natives in my classroom. Am I giving the kind of experience that is going to create a lifelong learner or am I turning someone off toward education because, most of the time I'm stuck settling for teaching styles that are less than what my students need. My fear is that the later is the truth and I find myself very frustrated by an education system that is so slow to change that every year we lose more and more students to boredom. My frustration comes at the very hand of my personal lifelong learning. I love Full Sails program but honestly the things that I'm learning about now I can't use now. My classroom does not have the technology to create the environment that my education teaches me my students need. So tonight I learn about how great teaching could be in a digital world and I know that it is true. I know the power of technology to change students learning. But tomorrow I will go to school and give out yet another paper worksheet. This is creating in me quite a moral debate. So what can I do to make the students in my classroom get even a small taste of what learning could and should be like. I have started with a plan to change. I plan to create a learning environment that more closely resembles the learning environment that digital natives learn best in, the world of gaming. I believe that if I can get students to understand the educational power in the video games that they play everyday then I can reach students that would have never consider learning science. I face two big challenges, one, convincing the students that they can learn science in games and two convincing my administration that students can learn science in games. According to Squire and Jenkins in, "Harnessing the power of Video Games",
"Games are not simply problems or puzzles; they are microworlds, and in such environments students develop a much firmer sense of how specific social processes and practices are interwoven, and how different bodies of knowledge relate to each other. In that sense, they resemble classic word problems, where students are invited to separate out the data they need from a much more complex field of information and then apply it toward specific tasks".
This kind of learning is at the heart of all good science. If I can only convince the administration of this fact, then I believe they would be more then willing to help me create an environment where I can engage students in this kind of learning for every curriculum area.
But for now I will work on the students, I will be forced to ask students to learn outside of my classroom and hope to make the learning so engaging that I can get students to engage on their own time. I will not stop fighting for what I know is right. I only hope that my students of today can forgive an outdated education system for the pain it puts both them and myself through while we wait.
Yes! I feel the same way. Here we are learning all this cool stuff, but how can we get a lap top for every person (or even every other person) in our class room? Have your students started doing any of the gaming you suggest at home? Can you give them assignments to do at home in the game?
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