Every student every day needs to be supercharged for learning. This deck explores what educators can do to supercharge the learners in their classrooms.

Scott is the Technology Teacher Leader for the Brecksville-Broadview Heights City Schools. He leads professional development in technology, blended learning, and 21st Century learning supporting his colleagues to make pedagogical shifts. He also helps educators learn about technology through Communicate Institute. Scott is active on Twitter sharing his thoughts about education and resources, and leads #ohedchat Twitter chats from time to time. You can learn more about him and what he does by visiting scottkinkoph.com

What does learning look like in this century, in the 21st century? How is it different from learning 5 years ago? What is it we are asking kids to do that is radically different? 21st Century learning is about helping students understand how to learn differently.

This slide deck attempts to explore what students and educators can do to help differentiate learning supercharging student success.

Learning differently is, in part, linked to technology for technology helps students to make connections to other learners. Technology helps our students connect and create. What's most important are the differentiation strategies that help students learn.

What are the skills a student needs to accel in this age of information abundance? What skills does an educator need to help students? A skill all need is how to locate information and use that information to make learning for others. Educators need to be able to collaborate, document their own learning, communicate, create, and facilitate their own and student learning.

Information literacy "is the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information." These skills are critical to becoming independent learners.

“Ultimately, information literate people are those who have learned how to learn. They know how to learn because they know how knowledge is organized, how to find information, and how to use information in such a way that others can learn from them. They are people prepared for lifelong learning, because they can always find the information needed for any task or decision at hand.”

Supercharging learning is helping students learn how to find information and create learning others learn from.

-Citation-
"Introduction to Information Literacy." Introduction to Information Literacy. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Mar. 2015.

Students need to be able to publish authentic works based on the information they have located, analyzed, and then produce authentic learning artifacts. In essence, students need to become illustrious producers of learning that is shared globally. Learners can blog, produce websites, aggregate and analyze data, record and edit video, and publish a variety of digital texts. Students are the producers of knowledge.

Supercharging learning is helping students explore and articulate learning in diverse ways.

Our world is a connected world. By 2020 there is a projection that 3.8 billion people will be connected. How does this affect learning? Our students need to know how find and make connections with other who can deepen their learning for the learning is far greater and richer beyond our classroom walls.

21st Century differentiation is helping our students find, interview, and learn from experts.

Discussion, debate, questioning, critique, and bantering are skills students need to have to be successful in a global society. Conversing is also about presenting learning in rationale ways to peers and the global community.

Supercharging learning is allowing students to be creatively creative. What can they do if we point the way and allow them create? Allowing students authority over their product gives them motivation to make the best. Remove the constraints that cause them to fear producing authentic works such as not meeting teacher expectations, grading, and making all products look the same.

The supercharged student views information, how it can help them, and production of new knowledge through the lens of a critical consumer. Is this information reliable? Is this information vetted? How can it help me learn what I need to whether that is in class or for personal gain. Young people today to adopt this attitude because the ubiquity of information.

Educators need to personalize learning for students to fit their needs and at the time they need it. Providing learning playlists for them becomes the norm in the classroom versus all students have to learn the same content the same way producing the same learning artifact.

We espouse differences among students saying they learn differently at different rates and in different modalities yet these assumptions are largely ignored in favor of one size fits all teaching practices.

One way to differentiate learning for gifted learners is give them choice - choice over what to learn and when, what to make, and how to make it. The idea is that choice is a direct sibling to personalized learning.

Change how you facilitate learning in your classroom by changing pedagogical approaches. At times direct instruction is needed. Many times it is not. Use approaches like debate, Socratic Seminar, learning menus, and more.

Educators using flexible approaches to learning meet the needs of students more often and at greater depth because they are using a student centered approach to learning.

Mastery learning or competency-based learning says students must master standards and learning targets at high levels of proficiency before moving on to learn the next concept. The use of formative assessments and helping students understand where they need to improve learning is crucial to this process. Simply saying to a student to relearn content, process, or concept with out justifying why leaves the student in permanent ambiguity because they know not what to address to learn differently.

Helping students to perservere while learning difficult processes, content, or concepts helps them build deeper learning capacity. However, simply forcing a student to learn in traditional ways does little to cause students to perservere. Changing the learning paradigm towards personalized learning can give students motivation to tackle tough problems without giving up.

Just like being a critical consumer students need to be critical thinkers. How to analyze, evaluate, judge, create, prove, and synthesize gives them the supercharged ability to publish work that is coherent, succinct, and thought provoking. Thinking critically is essential to existing in a world constantly uploading terabytes of data daily. Why at do I need to know, how do find it, and is it verifiable and reliable?

Stimulate curiosity in the 21st Century learner. Offer them complex questions that help them tie their life to standards you are trying to address making the learning of the standards transparent. Create convergence between "Wow! That's cool!" and "Demonstrate what you know."

Teacher is a passive noun for the word teacher implies all knowing and that a learner must learn from the teacher. With knowledge and learning being ubiquitous via the Internet the teacher's role must switch to that of learner and being able to facilitate their own learning. So, rather than teach, learn and learn how to facilitate learning.