21st Century

The phrase “21st century” is everywhere you see, you can google it and get a thousands results like 21st century skills, 21st century learners and teachers, 21st century education, and more you can see it in all of the major social media pages and several applications suggest they can help you improve it. The question then stands, What is it? Am I a part of it?
The 21st century skills suggest that we should acquire and apply core knowledge and critical-thinking skill into everyday tasks, demonstrate creativity, innovation, and flexibility make decisions and solve problems ethically and collaboratively use technology to gather and analyze information exhibit positive interpersonal relationships and display leadership skills that inspire others to achieve, serve, and work together.
It is important to consider that the 21st century also includes being aware of the digital literacy, which means being knowledgeable in the use of smartphones, tablets, computers, PCs or any other digital device seen as part of the network other that alone.

As a part of everything I must achieve I need the two following questions:

How do you describe yourself as a learner in the 21st Century?

As a learner in my profession the one and most important thing to mention and remember is than a person must never stop learning. Everyone can learn many things every day, at school, at work, at home or any other place, by living simple experiences every day and knowing if we should repeat them or not. As a teacher I know there are different developments in several educative areas every day and I must be ready and eager to keep learning, motivated and in constant improvement of myself so I am able to share and introduce my students to the challenges and competences they need to accomplish.

How do you describe yourself as a teacher in the 21st Century?

As a teacher of the 21st century I consider myself capable of developing lesson plans with personalized objectives and tasks for different learning types. There is no “one size fits all” so is important to create different moments where students can create their own permanent knowledge. To do this, is always important to keep up with the technology and the digital literacy must grow with the group’s objectives; the resources are important and technology always finds the way to keep interested and motivated to the students.

As mentioned before there are different several tasks students must obtain in order to continue and achieve success, they include critical thinking, collaboration, creativity and communication or the 4C’s for short, I know I must include them every day through the progress of the classroom for their own development.

The 21st Century is now. Almost every day new technologies are being developed and skills need to be improved to keep up with this new world.