Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Approaches to being good educator as a classroom teacher for the 21st Century



Original picture from:
Global perspective



























Original picture from Tech in classroom

ISTE's Educational Technology Standards for Teachers.


Obviously, having this above standards or not, we teachers have been always encouraging our students to explore the new knowledge, motivating students to be independent learner thinking critically and educating students to be citizenship responsibly and ethically in respective societies.



So here are the questions:

  • What are the most outstanding differences of our teaching in 21st Century?

  • What are the emphasis standards mentioned above comparing with the traditional ones?

  • How is this educational technology standards replacing some of our traditional teaching values ?

From my perspective, here is my understandings of the above questions:


  • The most outstanding differences in today's teaching life is to embed the Information technology into our classroom teaching. And this means at first teacher must own the information and technology literacy by all means, as it is written " Demonstrate fluency in technology system and transfer of current knowledge to new technologies and situations"
  • Here comes the second answer, "what are the emphasis standards?" What does this applications of the information and technology occurring in daily classroom teaching mean? This 21st digital-age is an age of collaboration and communication globally. So the emphasis of this ISTE standards are Collaboration and Communication.
  • In order to have our students collaborate and communicate well with people of other cultures from different continents, teacher himself at first should have global awareness, deeper understanding and appreciation of different perspectives of certain issues. Before leading students to this standard, teachers must be there first. Being more tolerant and broad-minded are the necessaries.
  • 21st Century is Information age. There is huge amount of teaching and learning resources for us to research. Teachers should display on how to relocate, analysize, evaluate and create new knowledge and understadnings out of the ocean of information from the internet world.

The above is my understanding of the challenge of being a good educator for the 21st century.
Yes I would rather say the ISTE standards for teachers is relevant enough to face the future challenges in the education of 21st century. And yet, how far have we been as teacher to meet those standards? Teachers of international schools worldwide might have more advantages of meeting those standards than the teachers in schools of home countries regarding more advanced technology teaching environment and having global perspectives as third culture person.


























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