21st Century Teaching Strategies

Produced by Edutopia, this video was realized in Singapore, at the NGEE ANN Secondary School. Singapore is recognized as one of the world's top education systems ! This podcast is very interesting. It deals with adapting teaching methods to pupils, to the world we live in. Several teachers explain how they try to find interesting technics to make their lessons attractive, they explain that using Technology, their pupils are engaged in the class. They collaborate instead of being focused on themselves, there is interaction between the pupils, they can exchange ideas, learn from others and teach their comrades things they know. I think this is very important that pupils feel integrated, that they are interested in what they learn. At first, I thought it was maybe something bad to introduce technology within the class because children would use it all the time, without interruption, and I think they have to interest themselves in other things than Internet, Facebook, etc. But I realized that computers, smartphones, and all things that belong to technology are "new ways to connect with the kids", if teachers adapted their methods to what pupils like, learning would become very rich, interesting. As Adrian Lim says in the video, it is important to consider how the world has changed to be able to make our teaching methods more attractive. Watching this video, we see that all the pupils seem happy to come to school, to learn with their comrades. Technology facilitates interaction between the teacher and the pupils; when there are 40 pupils in a class, it is not possible to listen to each pupil, whereas using smartphones, all the questions can be read on a board and each pupil feel that his question is important, is considered by everybody. I would myself use some kind of technologies because I realized how important it is to pay attention to what pupils want to learn, HOW they want to learn and how much it is important to adapt ourselves to them instead of asking them to adapt to our old methods. But I still think that we have to combine technology with books, with things that would help pupils not to be cut from the real world. Please, watch this video because it is very enriching ! :)
If you want to see it, click ItunesU, Teaching and Education, search "Teaching in the classroom" and click Technology Integration (Edutopia) on the left corner.