21st Century Education Assignment: Pillar Group Project

! For this assignment, we learned about the true definition of 21st Century Education. We

learned the six pillars that made up this whole idea, and were assigned to research and present

one of the pillars in more detail. We were split up into groups and each group had their own

pillar to work with. My group was assigned project based learning. To complete this assignment

my group had to explain what project based learning was, how it applied to 21st century

education, then how and why you should apply technology to it. Most groups were making a

powerpoint to present their work, but we decided to try something a little bit different, by making

our own app.

!21st Century Education Pillar Group Reflection:

In the beginning of this assignment, my group didn't have much enthusiasm about

completing it. We had not really had any outside communication about it, because email isn’t

something that anyone in our group was too prone to using. For this reason, we decided to create

a group Facebook as a place to discuss our project and post anything that we were working on

for it. We finally decided to meet, outside of class to even decide what to do, and thats when we

had the idea of trying something different that a plain old powerpoint. We started researching

ways to create an app, and we found a website that allowed you to do that.

Not really understanding exactly what we were doing, we started experimenting with it. Now,

looking back at it, we were actually applying the critical thinking pillar and the project based

learning pillar, while completing this assignment. The way that we found new ways to work and

connect with each other to create our app together, was very much, what we had been discussing

as 21st education in class. The only improvements that I would make for this assignment, if I

were applying it in my classroom, would be to assign days that my students would work on it

together in school. It is much more difficult for younger students, who can’t drive to reach each

other outside of class. I could also help them create pages for their group to discuss, on

Facebook, to use with their classmates, rather than them having to create one on their own. As an

educator, I could also use tools i leaned from this assignment, such as creating a page on

Facebook to work with my peers, and the whole idea of an app. Many classrooms that I have

been in recently, have either a classroom set of iPads, or a traveling set for the school to share.

Students would be so much more excited to learn about a topic using an app, or even by creating

an app of their very own.

!