This page was created by Lorena Rojas.
Glossary
21st century instruction: Ensure that students have real-world opportunities to synthesize, apply and demonstrate their mastery of key concepts and 21st century skills. These are the skills students need to succeed in work, school and life. They include:
- Core subjects (as defined by ESSA)
- 21st century content: global awareness, financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy, civic literacy and health and wellness awareness
- Learning and thinking skills: critical thinking and problem solving skills, communications skills, creativity and innovation skills, collaboration skills, contextual learning skills and information and media literacy skills
- Information and communications technology literacy
- Life skills: leadership, ethics, accountability, adaptability, personal productivity, personal responsibility, people skills, self-direction and social responsibility
Academic rigor: Instruction that promotes learners to think critically, creatively, and more flexibly.
Academic Rigor: Instruction that promotes learners to think critically, creatively, and more flexibly.
Asynchronous: Learning that does not occur in the same place or at the same time. The term is most commonly applied to various forms of digital and online learning in which students learn from instruction—such as prerecorded video lessons or game-based learning tasks that students complete on their own—that is not being delivered in person or in real time.
Competency-Based Progression: Transitioning away from seat time, in favor of a structure that creates flexibility, allows students to progress as they demonstrate mastery of academic content, regardless of time, place, or pace of learning. Competency-based strategies provide flexibility in the way that credit can be earned or awarded, and provide students with personalized learning opportunities. These strategies include online and blended learning, dual enrollment and early college high schools, project-based and community-based learning, and credit recovery, among others. This type of learning leads to better student engagement because the content is relevant to each student and tailored to their unique needs. It also leads to better student outcomes because the pace of learning is customized to each student.
Computational Thinking: CT is a problem-solving process that includes (but is not limited to) the following characteristics:
- Formulating problems in a way that enables us to use a computer and other tools to help solve them
- Logically organizing and analyzing data
- Representing data through abstractions such as models and simulations
- Automating solutions through algorithmic thinking (a series of ordered steps)
- Identifying, analyzing, and implementing possible solutions with the goal of achieving the most efficient and effective combination of steps and resources
- Generalizing and transferring this problem-solving process to a wide variety of problems
Differentiation: Instruction is tailored to the learning preferences of different learners.
Digital Badges: Digital badges are an assessment and credentialing mechanism that is housed and managed online. Badges are designed to make visible and validate learning in both formal and informal settings, and hold the potential to help transform where and how learning is valued.
Digital Citizenship: Digital citizenship can be defined as the norms of appropriate, responsible behavior with regard to technology use.
Digital Learning: any instructional practice that effectively uses technology to strengthen a student’s learning experience. Digital learning encompasses a wide spectrum of tools and practices.
Growth Mindset: Understanding that learner talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence.
Individualization: Instruction is paced to the learning needs of different learners.
Learner: Defined as students, teachers, administrators. Learners drive their learning from anywhere at anytime.
Learner Agency: Requires learners to take initiative and reflect on their progress to engage strategically in their own learning without waiting to be directed.
Learner-Centered Instruction: Pedagogy that is rigorous and based on college- and career-ready expectations; personalized; collaborative, relevant, and applied; and flexible, with learning taking place anytime, anywhere.
Learner Space or Learner-Centered Community: Learning spaces that are stimulating, engaging and supportive, provides opportunities for choosing and pursuing personalize learning goals.
Learning Management System (LMS): A learning management system (LMS) is a software application or Web-based technology used to plan, implement, and assess a specific learning process. Typically, a learning management system provides an instructor with a way to create and deliver content, monitor student participation, and assess student performance. A learning management system may also provide students with the ability to use interactive features such as threaded discussions, video conferencing, and discussion forums.
Mastery-based Learning: Mastery Learning maintains that students must achieve a level of mastery (i.e. 90% on a knowledge test) in prerequisite knowledge before moving forward to learn subsequent information. If a student does not achieve mastery on the test, they are given additional support in learning and reviewing the information, then tested again. This cycle will continue until the learner accomplishes mastery, and may move on to the next stage. Mastery learning methods suggest that the focus of instruction should be the time required for different students to learn the same material and achieve the same level of mastery. This is very much in contrast with classic models of teaching, which focus more on differences in students' ability and where all students are given approximately the same amount of time to learn and the same set of instructions.
Personalized Learning: Instruction is intentionally designed, where the teacher takes on the facilitator role and the student demonstrates learner agency as an empowered learner.
Project-Based Learning: Defined as a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an engaging and complex question, problem, or challenge.
Real-world Connections: Instruction activities that draw from, or upon, actual objects, events, experiences and situations to effectively address a concept, problem or issue. It involves learning allows students to actually experience or practice concepts and skills, as opposed to learning that is theoretical or idealistic. It features learning projects that directly relate to, are relevant to, or provide benefit to students, their families or the community.
Synchronous: Learning that occur at the same time, but not in the same place.
Ubiquitous Connectivity: Ubiquitous computing is a paradigm in which the processing of information is linked with each activity or object as encountered. It involves connecting electronic devices, including embedding microprocessors to communicate information. Devices that use ubiquitous computing have constant availability and are completely connected. Ubiquitous computing focuses on learning by removing the complexity of computing and increases efficiency while using computing for different daily activities.
Ubiquitous computing is also known as pervasive computing, everywhere and ambient intelligence.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL): A set of principles for curriculum development that give all individuals equal opportunities to learn. UDL provides a blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone--not a single, one-size-fits-all solution but rather flexible approaches that can be customized and adjusted for individual needs.