21st Century Skills Essay

21st Century Pedagogies/Blended Learning

Blended learning techniques offer a powerful tool to influence learners’ professional, linguistic, and personal lives with the integration of technology and learning. There are a few research articles on at-risk students and blended learning and the traditional thought that e-learners had to be highly independent and self-motivated was examined in the study by Barbour and Siko (2013). Their study was a case study that focused on only one students, who was labeled as an at-risk student, and they found that the student did only do the bare minimum to pass and that the habit of taking the path of least resistance was attributed to have taken hold far in his younger years, and this was important to understand

Kong et al. (2014) suggested that learning 21st century skills should be done through interaction with daily activities and applied through the educational process. There were six research issues identified in their review which consisted of the realization of 21st century skills by learners, bridging the gap between curriculum and societal situations, maximizing learning opportunities, building awareness in progress, and the assessment of 21st century skills (Kong et al., 2014). Lee and Hung (2012) focused on constructing a conceptualized instructional framework for 21st century learning. They proposed an instructional framework for the development of student dispositions, attitudes, skills, and knowledge that focuses on five zones of learning. The five zones of learning are the zone of instruction, zone of practice, zone of interaction, zone of tinkering, in zone of metacognition. The big ideas of 21st century learning are targeted on interactions between theory and practice, incorporating the individual and the community and learners who through reflective practice and application of metacognition interact (Lee & Hung, 2012). Learning in the 21st century must be flexible and adapted to the individual in a personalized