Presentation by Kathleen Ferenz

Kathleen's Keynote topic was Teaching for the 21st Century.
Resource: US Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/index.html

The first question she asked... 
How do we create a dynamic 21st century learning environment where today's students can achieve and thrive?

• What's happening in classroom (non-digital)... and outside classroom (digital)?
• The "WORLD" of the 21C learner - any mismatch?

Well, the questions she asked were not uncommon or anything new... as we gradually recognise the fact that we had been pigeonholing our students - to the way that we learnt, without considering the fact that the world has changed, and also the way our students learn would have changed because the environment where they were growing up was definitely pretty different from what we had.


So now, it's our turn to see how to shape the learning environment so that it caters to the needs and lifestyle of our learners! Then came the next question:

Question: How do you like to learn?
This gave the opportunity to highlight 2 important elements...
(1) Emotion  - create the emotional link so that students are able to be emotionally connected to what they learn and link the new knowledge with their prior knowledge. Indeed, it could be a set of skills too.
(2) Meaning - making learning meaningful... not for the sake of passing the test or exam. There is a purpose to learn certain thing. If it's not meaningful, then why learn? This would also allow learners to see how new knowledge is applicable in real world application!

Well, these 2 elements were not new to us... Indeed, we had been talking about this back in our school's Professional Development sessions! In particular, Curriculum Design and Applied Learning :)

Takeaways - Lesson examples
I think the best takeaways would be through experiencing the activity, which Kathleen did it beautifully with all the participants... and of course, PhotoBooth was a hook! So easy to use! and I could sense that the participants were all excited over it..