Birdie's back, ready and willing to spread its wings again after a long rest, ready to read and soar. ready to share and learn.
I´ll share my thoughts reagarding ELT 21st century skills before they are carried away by the autumn winds... Let's see...
ELT 21st Century Skills
I believe that it is intuition what would lead readers to enter the digital world in the library if they had the chance. However they don’t for they lack the essential tool: net connected computers. Their entrance to that world would be as natural as for a citizen to walk in local streets, and the results would be truly profitable.
Today I believe that I am an immigrant in students’ city because of the ease they handle technological tools with, but at the same time I can turn to be a tourist guide when it comes to ease their research skills both, when they use last century’s preferred source of research: books, or if by chance my computer is virus-free and a one –to-one good research can be engaged. Being that the library is not 21st century-like updated, I’m in a way limited to continue working just at a theoretical level about how to filter and summarise information using tech devises outside the library.
I feel proud to state that all of the tasks described as essential in the video-except the one of self assessment, are the ones that I set myself to work on with students in the year 2011 in the library, no matter how many mistakes I made on the way . I’m glad I used my intuition, just like locals do, to determine what skills were necessary to be offered to students in the library to set and re-define my own goals to help these readers. What I called ¨workshops¨ -though the four lacked an actual and significant practical stage- on Study Tips, on How To Go Over Books, on Library Skills, and on Plagiarism seem to have covered what this expert on the video we’re commenting highlights as essential 21st century skills: quoting, developing critical and analytical skills, expressing one’s own opinions, communicating and team working, leading; and being lead, speaking out, being listened to. And so have the Literature Circles and Book Clubs!
I’m glad to know that this new starting year that I’m back at school I am going to fully devote my attention to the same goals for I’m apparently on the right path to assist students in improving their skills of communication, reflection, and discovering their strengths and weaknesses as readers. As I’ve always believed and as I always will, it is only after trying things out more than once than one can improve them on.
ELT 21st Content
Cross curricular expertise, such as Art for illustrating or dramatising a story piece, can continue to be shared among students in Literature Circles, when they are to perform a specific task according to a role assigned, for example the Art Director. Cross curricular subjects are also developed when both, in the classroom and in the library the project main story theme are shared and so the story for Literature Circles accompanies the knowledge that takes place in the classroom.
There’s an inevitable need during Literature Circles to compare students’ own lives and the one of story characters, no matter if they are fictional or not . It has always cropped up. So I think that a cross-curricular connection has been done.
I think that developing basic notions of global themes is essential to students. I wish there was enough and updated material in the library regarding themes such as the environment, global warming, recycling, poverty, unwealth, access to clean water, trade, charity, food, and money to provide students with a global perspective.
ELT 21st Century Tools
I still humbly claim for the purchase of books (from the past century) and the weekly systematic use of only six net books in the library to offer students the necessary tools to carry out basic research , so I don’t dare ask about the possibility to have nor a white board as Kath suggests or any other tool…
