1.

21th Century Edcation

 The 21st century education is about giving students the skills they need to succeed in
this new world, and helping them grow the confidence to practice those skills. With so
much information readily available to them, 21st century skills focus more on making
sense of that information, sharing and using it in smart ways.
 21st century teachers need to serve as a guide or mentor for their students, not as the
all-knowing sage providing them with all their information. With so much access to
resources of all kinds, children are invariably going to know more than teachers on
different topics, and be a step ahead of the technology in use. Teachers need to be
empowered as facilitators and motivators for learning, so that they can empower their
students in turn.
 21st century schools are also responding to demand by moving into international
education. ISC Research have tracked these changes in their research. In the past,
international schools were primarily for the families of military personnel and diplomats.
In the year 2000 there were 2,500 international schools globally with fewer than one
million students attending, but in December 2016 there were over 8,600 international
schools with almost 4.5 million students. The vast majority of these students are now
local children hoping to attend university in the West. Schools which aren’t traditional
‘international schools’ are also striving to create an internationally connected education
through travel opportunities, exchange programs, school partnerships, international
school leadership, and online communication. Learning to be a global citizen is crucial
in a world where technology is erasing borders, and you don’t necessarily need an
international education masters degree to incorporate this into your teaching.
2. characteristic of 21th Century Education and their definition
1. Personalized Learning-A personalized approach recognizes that not all students learn in the
same manner.Personalized learning involves differentiating instruction so that students can learn
in ways that suit their personal needs. 

Educators can adjust their teaching methods in several ways. They could:

 Differentiate content difficulty;

 Differentiate modes of delivery; and 
 Differentiate assessment strategies. 

2. Equity, Diversity And Inclusivity

In the 20th Century students were expected to conform to the mainstream or be excluded. But in the
21st Century, social inclusion and difference are celebrated.

We embrace equity, diversity and inclusivity in classrooms by:

 Equity: A goal of 21st Century educators is to achieve equality of outcomes. Educators

are attempting to close achievement gaps between rich and poor. Hopefully one day
your family’s wealth will not determine how successful you are at school.
 Diversity: Diversity is now considered a strength in classrooms. When students are
different, they learn that difference is okay. They befriend people of different cultures
and learn not to be afraid of other cultures around them.
 Inclusivity: We now believe that people of all ability levels, physical disabilities, or
learning disabilities deserve to be included in mainstream classrooms. This can help
them contribute to mainstream life and show them they are welcome and equal
participants in the world.
3.  Learning Through Doing

Old behaviorist methods of education that were typical in the 20th Century saw learning as:
 Memorization of information.
 Transmission of information from teacher to student.
 Filling your mind up with facts.
These methods are thrown out in a 21st Century learning approach

. 4. Rethinking Learner And Teacher Roles

In the 21st Century, classrooms have changed from being teacher-centered to student-
centered.
In the past the students all focused on the teacher and listened to the teacher’s words. Now, the
teacher focuses on the students who are the center of attention. The teacher’s job is to help coach
the students as they learn.

5. Community Relationships

We are increasingly realizing how important community engagement is for learning.

In our communities there are amazingly useful people who can teach and inspire our students far
better than we can.Teachers know they can’t be experts on everything. But there is an expert for
every topic out there in the world.

6. Technology

Modern technologies can be incredibly helpful in classrooms today. Walk into a classroom now and
you’ll be shocked at how much things have changed in just a decade. Technology is everywhere!

It is important to use new learning technologies in appropriate ways. Students shouldn’t use
technology to prevent them from thinking or help them cheat. Instead, technology should be used to
help students access information or think in ways they couldn’t have done so otherwise. We call
technologies that help students think harder ‘cognitive tools’ for learning.
7. Teacher Professionalization

Teaching children in this century is clearly much more complicated than it was in the last one! We
need to create personalized lessons, be inclusive, aim for eqaulity, encourage creativity, engage with
the community, use technology to enhance learning, and more!

To ensure students get the best learning possible, teachers in the 21st Century need ongoing training
and support. They need to know all the latest research on best teaching practices. They need
opportunities to ask questions themselves, try out new strategies and learn from experts throughout
their career.

One of the biggest challenges for teachers is the rapidly changing educational environment. New
technologies are quickly coming into classrooms to help us personalize and support learning for all
our students.

Teachers need time and space to learn how to use technology and new pedagogies in ways that will
best help their students
3. 3 categories of 21th Century skills and their definition
1.learning skill-The four C’s are by far the most popular 21st Century skills. These skills are also
called learning skills.More educators know about these skills because they’re universal needs for
any career. They also vary in terms of importance, depending on an individual’s career aspirations.

The 4 C’s of 21st Century Skills are:

 Critical thinking: Finding solutions to problems

 Creativity: Thinking outside the box
 Collaboration: Working with others
 Communication: Talking to others
2.literacy skills-They’re sometimes called IMT skills, and they’re each concerned with a different
element in digital comprehension.

The three 21st Century literacy skills are:

 Information literacy: Understanding facts, figures, statistics, and data

 Media literacy: Understanding the methods and outlets in which information is published
 Technology literacy: Understanding the machines that make the Information Age possible

Information literacy is a foundational skill. It helps students understand facts, especially data
points, that they’ll encounter online. More importantly, it teaches them how to separate fact from
fiction.

Media literacy is the practice of identifying publishing methods, outlets, and sources while
distinguishing between the ones that are credible and the ones that aren’t. Just like the
previous skill, media literacy is helpful for finding truth in a world that’s saturated with information.
This is how students find trustworthy sources of information in their lives. Without it, anything
that looks credible becomes credible. But with it, they can learn which media outlets or formats to
ignore. They also learn which ones to embrace, which is equally important.

 technology literacy goes another step further to teach students about the machines involved
in the Information Age.Technology literacy gives students the basic information they need to
understand what gadgets perform what tasks and why. This understanding removes the intimidating
feeling that technology tends to have. After all, if you don’t understand how the technology works, it
might as well be magic. But technology literacy unmasks the high-powered tools that run today’s
world. As a result, students can adapt to the world more effectively. They can play an important role
in its evolution

3.Life skills is the final category.  Also called FLIPS, these skills all pertain to someone’s personal
life, but they also bleed into professional settings.

The five 21st Century life skills are:

 Flexibility: Deviating from plans as needed

 Leadership: Motivating a team to accomplish a goal
 Initiative: Starting projects, strategies, and plans on one’s own
 Productivity: Maintaining efficiency in an age of distractions
 Social skills: Meeting and networking with others for mutual benefit
Flexibility is the expression of someone’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Flexibility is
crucial to a student’s long-term success in a career. Knowing when to change, how to change, and
how to react to change is a skill that’ll pay dividends for someone’s entire life.

Leadership is someone’s penchant for setting goals, walking a team through the steps required, and
achieving those goals collaboratively.

True success also requires initiative, requiring students to be self-starters. Initiative only comes
naturally to a handful of people. As a result, students need to learn it to fully succeed. This is one of
the hardest skills to learn and practice. Initiative often means working on projects outside of regular
working hours.

Along with initiative, 21st Century skills require students to learn about productivity. That’s a
student’s ability to complete work in an appropriate amount of time. By understanding productivity
strategies at every level, students discover the ways in which they work best while gaining an
appreciation for how others work as well. That equips them with the practical means to carry out the
ideas they determine through flexibility, leadership, and initiative.

Still, there’s one last skill that ties all other 21st Century skills together.

Social skills are crucial to the ongoing success of a professional. Business is frequently done

through the connections one person makes with others around them.

This concept of networking is more active in some industries than others, but proper social skills are
excellent tools for forging long-lasting relationships. While these may have been implied in past
generations, the rise of social media and instant communications have changed the nature of human
interaction. As a result, today’s students possess a wide range of social skills

4. New Literacies, Fuctional Literacy, and Multi-literacy

A. Literacies under New literacy

 The theory of New Literacies emerged in the field of education as a response to the
changing world, which changes dramatically from old capitalism (Fordism) to the
new global capitalism (Gee, 2004; Hall, 1996). Significantly different from the old
form of industry that is characterized by “centralized mass production, hierarchical
management, and stable employment structure”, the new form of industry is more
about “rapidly changing information, distributed management and regulations, and
unpredictable, project-oriented employment”, due to the innovation and development
of technology (Tang, 2015). Facing the dramatic change in economy, educators
argue that the conventional literacy education may not be able to fully prepare
students for the challenges in the modern working and social life (Gee, 2004; Lave &
Wenger, 1991; Luke, 1998). Thus, as the world has changed, the definition of
literacy should be broadened accordingly. The New Literacies theory is such an
attempt to expand the definition of what literacy consists of. The most important
feature that distinguishes New Literacies from other literacy perspectives is that New
Literacies emphasizes on “the epochal change in everyday technologies and its
associated cultural practices” (Coiro et al., 2008). It extends beyond the conventional
view of literacy as printed and written texts, and includes meaning-making practices
using digital technologies (e.g., video games, weblogs, mobile texts, etc.), and
explores the changes of beliefs towards literacy in the process of practices.
Regarding the definition of New Literacies, there have been debates about what
constitutes the “new”. However, two constructs conceptualized in Lankshear and
Knobel (2007) are widely accepted by scholars to characterize the “new” in New
Literacies: the new “technical stuff” and the new “ethos stuff”.
 B. Literacies under Funtional Literacies
 Its refers to the capacity of a person to engage in all those activities in which literacy
is required for effective function of his or her group and community and also for
enabling him or her to continue to use reading, writing and calculation for his or her
own and the community’s development.

C. Literacies under Multy-literacy

 The concept of “Multiliteracies” was firstly introduced in the New London Group
(1996) as an attempt to enrich the definition of literacy to accommodate to new
practices in peoples’ working, public and private lives: The old “command-and-
control” structure of work is replaced by “horizontal relationships of teamwork” and
workers are required to be more “multiskilled” instead of “deskilled”; the old sense of
monocultural and monolingual is replaced by the identification and appreciation of
cultural and linguistic diversity; personal life is much more tightly connected to the
public and the globe (New London Group, 1996). The utilization of new technologies
and the emergence of new forms of social relationships produce new languages.
People need to learn and become literate in different forms of languages in different
contexts. A major difference between Multiliteracies and the conventional view of
literacy is that in Multiliteracies perspective, literacy is not restricted to printed or
written forms of language but instead, it involves multiple modes of representation,
such as music, gestures, and pictures (Perry, 2012; New London Group, 1996). In
other words, although the printed and written literacy is important, it is only one kind
of literacy that makes meaning in a narrowed area. The view of literacy as
multimodal is one of the characteristics defined by Multiliteracies scholars.
Multiliteracies theory also contends that literacy is situated and has a social purpose
(Olthouse, 2013). Literacy is situated because literacy practices are different in
different contexts. For instance, an email written and sent to a friend is not the same
as an email written and sent to the manager, and the uses of English are diverse in
different countries by different cultural groups. Moreover, Multiliteracies theory
claims that educating students to be able to “design social futures” is a specific
purpose of literacy (Olthouse, 2013). The “social futures” refers to the achievement
of meeting the requirements in ethical and practical challenges in the new era, which
include participating in meaningful work and civic activities with people from diverse
backgrounds (New London Group, 1996).

5. Integration of New Literacies in the Curriculum