21st century skills

In our classrooms we are wanting to enhance the children's learning and encourage higher-order thinking skills - the integration of ICT can help us to do this. Some recent research about teachers and ICT integration in classrooms found that the majority of the teachers studied were unclear about what they meant by higher-order thinking skills.

enGauge has a very good area on their site about 21st Century skills. Here is their list:

Students Who Are Higher-Order Thinkers and Sound Reasoners:

Identify the essential elements in a problem as well as the interaction between those elements; use electronic tools to facilitate analysis.

Assign relative values to essential elements of a problem and use those values to rank elements in meaningful ways; assess similarities and differences in problems and their elements.

Construct relationships between the essential elements of a problem that provide insight into it; extract implications and conclusions from facts, premises, or data.

Create and apply criteria to gauge the strengths, limitations, and value of information, data, and solutions in productive ways.

Build new solutions through novel combinations of existing information.

Another video from teachertube about blogging in plain English. Many of my students have difficulties thinking about using blogs or wikis in the classroom so this is another video I will be directing some of them to: