How to manage a 21st Century Classroom

The class has the opportunity to meet with Ms. Kathleen Frenez, Apple consultant, and we discussed about how to manage a 21st Century Classroom with one-on-one computer environment. It was stated in the class that it would be better that teacher work as a netwrok to support their professional development. The 21st Century Classroom is about how to bring the world together on line into the classroom and how learning can happen with this new kind of environment. We saw sample from www.log.gov/teachers about the comments made on historical pictures. The purpose of this exercise is to create writing through pictures and to learn about a good critique. She also mentioned about how classroom set up change when every student has his/her own computer. Teacher should realize that classroom should be in a flexible environment and moving all the times. It seems to me that students now can hardly focus on one activity for the whole class time. They need to be moved, to be motivated by new things and to be stimulated in their thinking and able to associate their learning material with their life.

According to Ms. Kathleen Frenez, teacher should realize that during the direct instruction, students do not need to open their laptop. This is because open laptop will distract their attention from the direct instruction. Last but not least, teacher has to start the lesson with something that is very interesting, with inquiry mind then learning will occur.

For me I am always motivated my class with everyday news and lead them to the vocabulary and content they should learn from the news. Students will remember the new vocabulary associated with the news I present and also we are able to create the class discussion on the current event. Q&A session is the major part for them the learn language but still it is hard for them to retain the learnt vocabularies. I have to repeat and tried to use same kind of news that will have the same vocabularies with different situation. This will work quite well with the news about natural diaster, environment, accident and some basic political issues.