Concluding Assignment

I'm not going to answer the two questions in any order or in a systematic way, but I have learned a lot about what it takes in order to apply and answer these two questions about the 21st century classroom, and want to explain what I have learned from and thus believe in when it comes to assessing and implementing the knowledge I gained from this class.

The 21st century classroom is how education and subjects in the class are being taught by educators today. There has been a major transformation within the past few centuries of education, particularly since the age of technology began. Schools went from type-writers to PC's to Macs to laptops to iPads, from chalkboards to whiteboards to smartboards. The 21st century classroom deals with this new age of technology. Due to technology and the fact that learning can now occur outside of the classroom without a teacher, there needs to be a switch in how teachers teach their students in order to keep them intrigued and interested. My generation and those younger were brought up in this "coming-of-age" of technology and just seem to "know" how to work technologies, and in order to keep up with them and their knowledge of these technologies, we as educators need to learn how to incorporate these technologies in the classrooms.

“Children raised on new media technologies are less patient with filling out worksheets and listening to lectures.” (Collins & Halverson, 2009) Since technology makes everything accessible to our fingertips and makes things faster, students become impatient and bored with textbooks, worksheets, and note-taking in a notebook. Incorporating the technologies that we learned about in this class such as iTunes U, podcasts, youtube, teachertube, skype, googledocs, thinkfinity,which are such amazing technologies that are free for anyone to use! These technologies are tools for lifelong learning beyond the classroom. Educators will have to be able to keep up-to-date with the all new technologies that find their way into the classroom in order to keep up with their students and the way education is being implemented in the classrooms.

The different technologies that we assigned ourselves to research and blog about over the course of this class has helped us as learners and potential teachers learn and access the different technologies that are out there in the world. Watching videos and reading the text about technology and how others view technology when it comes to education was a big help in forming our own ideologies on how we might implement technology in our own classrooms.

Like I said in one of the discussion forums, the quote by Collins and Hallverson about how "schools develop courses such as Keyboarding and Introduction to Computers not only to teach students new skills, but also to keep computers in their proper place. These courses tell students, "Computers can be useful, but you can learn all you need to know about them in one or two courses."" (pgs. 34-35) I still believe, even now at the end of this course think that schools need to invest more in learning how to use computers better, because it doesn't take just two courses to learn everything about a computer. It might take two courses to learn different applications but I also believe they need to teach us how to use the internet better for research purposes. This course was helpful in this way because I already know how to use a computer, I just had no idea about all of the different technologies and sources on the internet that could be used to foster meaningful learning and create lifelong learning.

People of all ages barely have a legitimate reason nowadays to not learn. Information and learning is so simple and easy to access now, all one has to do is open a laptop and will be able to access anything from online courses, iTunes U lectures from professors or legitimate sources all over the world, or documentaries on the Holocaust from the History channel site. The 21st century classroom is a classroom that is filled with all sorts of technology that the students and especially the teachers know how to use in order to have an immense amount of knowledge thrown at them in all shapes and forms.

The technologies I have listed above all foster meaningful teaching and learning, not only for the students, but for the teachers as well. The 21st century classroom is no longer a classroom where only the students learn, but the teachers are constantly learning as well.