My 21st Century Classroom

This is a virtual display of my 21st Century classroom.  I chose to use blue and white for the walls because the color blue is said promote creativity and encourages students to "think outside the box".  I chose to make only two of the walls blue and leave the others white because I felt that having all of the walls as one color would be too much.  The arrangement of the classroom was designed to allow students to work together in groups and to promote collaboration between students sitting at the tables but the free moving chairs also allows for students to move around the room and talk to other groups.  The ability to move around the tables freely allows for students and teacher to adapt from class to class and activity to activity. They organization of the room is rather simple.  The students have their textbooks for the class and then other than that the technology contains the rest of the the classroom's information.  I wanted to keep the classroom simple so that it allows for students to use the space as the need to.  There will also be an abundance of technology in this classroom including TV monitors on the walls which will be linked to the Smartboard that will be on the blue wall with the door.  This way the students can always have a way to see the presented information no matter where they are seated.  Each student will also have an Intel ultrabook.  I chose this laptop/tablet because its exactly that, a laptop and tablet in one.  This will allow students to use the laptop as they are working at their tables but then to instantly be able to move from place to place with the portability of a tablet.  I am hoping that these ultrabooks will promote the students to want to move around the room and share their ideas with other classmates.  I want the technology to promote collaboration and cooperation.


I plan to continue to grow as and educator and a learner by staying connected to the outside world through channel like twitter and blogs.  I will use these networks that can be created through those avenues and bring shared ideas from others into my classroom.  I will also share ideas within my our school and district and talk to my fellow colleagues about their own techniques.

Not only do I need to make sure that I am connected but I also need to do my best to promote my students to create their own Personal Learning Networks.  I can accomplish that by teaching my students about becoming digital citizens and showing them different ways to reach people through the internet.  I can connect them to experts through Skype and helping them establish professional twitter accounts in order to connect with professionals with insight on what my students are interested in.  Now I can only help them get started but I feel that if I can show students that being a digital citizen and being an independent learner is the best way to become successful in this new digital age then maybe I can change the way they see learning.  One of the other dilemmas that can come up is keeping parents connected to the classroom, but i feel that there is a rather simply solution to that problem.  I can provide grades through an online gradebook, I will also send out frequent emails to parents so that they are aware of what is going on in class and lastly I will keep a blog up to date with everything that is happening in class so that the parents can feel free to check up on what their kids are doing.

This is obviously the ideal classroom in my mind and one that is not always available to every school and every teacher, but with some work a great teacher can make the most out of any situation and I plan on doing everything I can to impact every student in a positive way.