Graduate Attributes and 21st Century Curricula - Integrating Technology to Leverage Learning

Disclaimer: This blog entry is in support of the workshop held at Broumana High School - Lebanon on April 9, 2016.

Educators and policy makers share a rising concern about equipping learners with 21^st century skills that empower them to embrace their future. With 15% of the 21^st century already behind us, the call for transforming, upgrading and breathing life into our curricula is more pressing than ever (Jacobs, 2010). Information and communication technology (ICT), properly harnessed, can help bring about the desired change in the current education scape. ISTE's essential conditions to leverage technology for learning can provide a solid theoretical framework that informs the vision and stage setting of such a transformational endeavor. Unpacking each of ISTE's essential conditions is context sensitive and pertains to each school setting and its stakeholders. Designing how these essential conditions operate harmoniously is an intrinsic and vital part of such an educational transformation.

Resources and apps that can help inform the design of the following essential conditions:

Shared Vision
A shared vision transcends a vision for technology use. One dimension of a shared vision could start with graduate attributes and 21st century skills. Such attributes could help define the school mission statement and resulting objectives. They, thus help bring about the curriculum standards that are at the heart of daily teaching and learning.
Graduate attributes and 21st century skills could be gathered from the following resources:

UNESCO
OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)
ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education)
IB (International Baccalaureate) Learner's profile
The school mission statement

Curriculum Framework

To help design and map a 21st century curriculum the following resources could prove invaluable:

Partnerships for 21st Century Learning
Curriculum 21 Mapping the Global Classroom to the Future

Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World (Professional Development) 1st Edition

Active Literacy Across the Curriculum

Student-Centered Learning

Learning Management Systems can help drive a learning that is designed to address the needs of the learners. Here below are links to learning management systems:

Moodle

Edmodo

Fishtree

Canvas

Blackboard

Also the "Padagogy Wheel" is an excellent resource for leveraging technology through a learning design built around graduate attributes and Blooms cognitive categories and resulting active verbs and related activities, all informed by the SAMR model. The Arabic Padagogy Wheel was released in January 2016.

Assessment and Evaluation

Technology can be leveraged to help drive continuous assessment of teaching and learning. LMS could encompass assessment tools and students' learning tracking. Here below are simple formative assessment tools that can help drive student-centered teaching/learning

Plickers

Kahoot!

Padlet

Mouse Mischief on MS-Powerpoint

Skilled Personnel

To help educators become skilled at selecting and leveraging the right ICT resources to enhance teaching and learning, check out the following resources and certifications:

UNESCO's ICT Conceptual Framework for Teachers

Microsoft Certified Educator in the MS learning paths, the teaching with technology course can help prepare you for the MCE exam

Ongoing Professional Learning

To help drive ongoing professional learning, the support of fellow educators and professional learning communities is invaluable. Become a connected educators by growing your own Professional/Personal/Personalized Learning Network PLN. Get involved in Twitter educational chats, in Google hangouts on relevant educational topics. Attend webinars on professional topics that interest you. "Our best resource is each other" said an educator on Twitter!

Goal Setting to Start High School "Right"

High school is an exciting and critical stage of school life. Starting high school "right" for grade 10 students was a big issue for me as a principal. My starting point was to define what the word "right" implicated.
Starting "right" meant students being warmly welcomed
Starting "right" meant making students know and feel that they mattered
Starting "right" meant motivating students
Starting "right" meant giving students focus and direction
That seems like a challenging list for a first day of school. Still, it was on my agenda as a principal and then it spread to the agenda of the entire high school community. To translate our list into action, we setup a plan for a day full of activities for the first school day of grade 10 students. Grade 10 is the first high school year in the Lebanese educational system.
Our warm welcome translated into greeting them with a smile and cheers as they entered into the school building, followed by a carefully prepared animated morning assembly with a spiritual and motivational theme.
Then students permuted into 5 different 50 minute activities that aimed at covering the scope of "starting right" as we perceived it:

1. A school tour to get a feel of the place and note the places and people they will come in contact with. Needless to stay at every stop (library, lab, administrative offices), a cheerful welcome was prepared for them.
2. A hands-on workshop promoting practical organization skills (self-test for time management awareness and skills, handling and managing schedules, efficient use of folders for maximal organization, resourceful use of locker space and times, etc.)
3. A meeting with the Students' Affairs Office for school life and activities issues and insights on high school planning, choices, university and career planning.
4. A data gathering session to fill up the Students Profile Sheet, a computerized system for gathering data on each student's learning styles, multiple intelligence, study preferences. Reports could then be generated to students and parents and also to teachers to take into consideration as they prepared their lessons as well as to other instances for different purposes
5. A goal setting session to inculcate the life skill of effective goal setting knowing that goals give direction, focus, and motivation. Each student is expected to set three goals by the end of the session: an academic goal, a habit or personal goal and a social goal.

In short, day 1 of secondary school at our school, is a day full of engaging activities that translate our way getting students to start high school "right". Students' messages, even years after, reflected the impact that this day and specifically the Goal Setting session had on them. 

"All of this negative energy was channeled into a positive one when you first spoke to us at my first secondary assembly.  It was at that moment, yes, as early as the first day, that I made a choice to excel in secondary school"

"And throughout my first year at secondary school, I strove to fulfill these specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely goals (Yes, I didn't forget them yet). "

"You made my dreams and goals in life seem a little bit more possible and concrete"

"Although I have the memory of a fish, I still remember your goal-setting speech, and your advice about setting attainable, realistic, yet ambitious aspirations for the school year, and, most plausibly, for life"

Here is a link for the Goal Setting lesson resources: 

          Goal Setting Session resources