Research Question: How does Flipped Classroom Model support 21st-Century Learning Skills to Promote Creativity in the Secondary Classroom?

The increasing demand for creative individuals in the labor market requires well-prepared professionals capable of enhancing competitiveness through new ideas and innovative actions. From that point, I believe that educators should implement teaching and learning approaches that foster creativity and enhance thinking in order to get an effective learner and thinker to be able to engage with and adapt to the changing world we live in.

From my observation of many classes for my colleagues, I see the most effective teaching that makes good use of creative approaches and help the young people develop their own creative abilities where teachers guide but do not over-direct students. The ability to communicate their ideas, their thinking clearly and respectfully is something that will benefit students in all area of their life and something a lot of people grow up never learning how to do well.

As I have begun my journey in TEACH-NOW program, I have entered with high hopes. I have had all the potential to become a teacher and make a difference in students’ learning in various aspects. When I was a high school/middle school student; I remember myself being in the classroom of twenty to twenty-five students where the teacher told us that no laptops, no cell phones or any other devices are allowed. We should listen, take notes with pen or pencil and of course a notebook! We were able to use computers during the computer lessons. It was difficult to participate or having discussions in the classroom, as students we emphasized on passing tests not encouraged to understand techniques or skills of how to find the information or the answer. I remember when I asked my friends after we had graduated from high school what they learned during that period, they had difficulty to recall specifics. This explained the traditional teaching and learning method which has been considered as the best way of teaching for many years in my school that time!

Adapting a team model to a classroom environment, working collaboratively and interacting with others are essential skills that all secondary level students need to learn and demonstrate and every teacher needs to provide them with opportunities to develop essential collaborative thinking and learning skills. As a teacher, I do believe that developing understanding would occur within the constant interplay between the group and the individual.

I have always been interested in what is called Flipped classroom as an active, student-centered approach that was formed to increase the quality of period within class through creating time for varied instructional techniques, including active learning and higher order thinking, along with increased student-to-teacher interaction and creativity. In my research I would discuss what flipped classroom approach is, flipped classroom technology models, looking at the learning through a student-centered inquiry process that initiates scaffolding of the learning by the teacher and peer group where the key aim of the learning approach is for students to take more responsibility for their learning as Robinson said working in groups or teams will facilitate a creative and engaging learning environment. He thinks this will work to personalize education, sparking a paradigm shift away from the current model.

I believe that this flipped learning is a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment where teacher guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter.  Throughout my research, I would address the requirements of serious commitment and understanding by the teacher and quality engagement by the students themselves to promote creativity in the classroom environment. Defining the creativity, addressing the importance of creativity in the classroom, I would also discuss the ways in which flipped classroom model benefits students' learning mentioning the key points for better understanding the implementation of creativity and thinking in classrooms. Identifying the characteristics of teachers who are considered creative educators, as well as specific instructional strategies that would be incorporated in the flipped class to develop the skills of high-level thinking and creativity.

I will be looking at the flipped model as a way to teach students how to learn and ways of thinking, engaging them through collaboration which can motivate creativity in different ways. Finding practical ways in the flipped classroom approach that teachers can be used to encourage creative performance and thinking in groups of students which is essential because we can not work with students one-on-one all of the time. It is worth to give students the chance to work collaboratively and to make the process of collaboration more creative, as well as the tools and the use of technology that teachers would provide through this model to enable creativity so students can choose to do some digging into a subject.

While working on my research I would discuss the following and while I am doing my research I would add to this accordingly :

• What do we know about the curriculum and flipped learning in promoting creativity in the classroom? As teachers, it is important to be aware of the wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives of our students. This awareness needs to be translated into the curriculum, pedagogy and all aspects of teaching to ensure the creativity with the flipped learning.
• What contributes to the development of creative educators (specific training for 21st-century teachers)? The skills of teachers in designing this model, the materials, types of equipment, learning managements systems that would be used in the flipped classroom.
• The chronological perspective to examine the pedagogical practice of flipping a class, reminding s that this practice existed many years before it was named.
• The effective use of flipping class to enhance creativity and thinking, some structure routines, probing questions, and documentation we can make students’ thinking more visible toward foster better thinking and learning. I would look at the classroom layout/design, the learning environment that would promote collaboration, and help in establishing a connection between students’ real lives and classroom.
• Addressing the reflective activities in the flipped model in which students think about what they learned, how it will help them, its relevance, and more. Reflection would be a regular part of flipped learning to be effective and promote creativity as students need metacognition to connect content to objectives.

Working as a shadow teacher in high school would help me to include an observation of teachers complete classroom session and a post a class discussion mentioning the actual classroom practices that would be observed and notes would be recorded in order to provide a holistic understanding of their flipping class practices.

In the end, as I have mentioned before, demographic information about the teacher’s age, years of teaching experience, educational preparation, and specific training related to 21st-century skills would be collected. In addition to the classrooms observations, the documents that would be used in the class, such as class objectives, PowerPoint presentations, and the use of any other technological equipment that are suitable for flipped learning condition such as (PDFs, recorded sounds, websites) or any lecture videos from the internet sites such as Khan Academy, YouTube or Ted Talks that would be collected and reviewed as a data source to supplement my observation describing the collaboration and communication strategies and the classroom environment have been used, looking at what flipped learning system, pedagogical delivery style, and technology has been used and including reflections to supplement my observation data.

The Writing Process

We as a profession do not see ourselves as writers. For many of us, the lack of writing confidence goes back to our own school experiences where we wrote for the teacher (never ourselves) and judged our mastery according to teacher comments and red correction marks on our papers. Certainly, that was true for me. Despite the fact that we all write letters, cards, newsletters, lists, notes (and research papers, if we are taking a college course), we rarely share these with our students to show them we are writers. When our students see how we struggle, organize, think, reread, revise, edit, and get ideas with and through our own writing, they are supported in their writing.

When they see our process because we show it to them, speak it aloud, do it in front of them, we are demonstrating the most powerful of practices while giving them a lifelong tool - using writing to remember, to organize our thinking, to reflect, to communicate effectively, to problem-solve, to understand our world, to inquire and make new meaning.

There are several reasons why we teachers must take the risk and write. I believe we have a responsibility to share our knowledge and talents with others as our own classroom stories give confidence, insights, practical suggestions, and inspiration to our fellow teachers that would make us better teachers by becoming more observant and reflective as when I am working in a classroom and something happens that I want to remember or think about further, I write it down within a few hours. Otherwise, it is gone. So many new things keep happening that I lose the insight unless I record promptly digitally (Google Document) or on a notebook.

For students writing helps students review and remember recently learned the material. A brief writing assignment at the end of a class as an exit ticket, focusing on the day’s lesson and discussions, is a great way to reinforce the material, support a long-term recall of the key lesson points and help build writing skills all at the same time.

Writing helps us as educators to assess student learning. Probably the most common use of writing in the classroom is for a given student to demonstrate that he or she knows and understands a concept. Whether the assignment is, for example, a compare-and-contrast essay, writing assignments help us see what material students have mastered and where there may be gaps.

Some instructional recommendations that can be implemented in conjunction with existing standards or curricula that I can use when planning instruction to support the development of writing skills among students in science class to increase their science literacy so students must be given the opportunity to process their ideas before, during and after new learning takes place that can be done in writing.

As in biology classes have specific requirements in the kinds of writing students are likely to do, just like every other subject. In particular, though, most writing assignments students would get tasked within different forms such as long, research essays that are in-depth evaluations of new findings and recent information on selected biology topics. Some short essays that focus on scientific topics that could be part of the course or unit or are in the media, review some articles or findings and some resources. The most writing practice we do in science classes is lab report. This paper document students’ laboratory projects and usually they follow a specific format. As with all forms of writing since students will be writing scientific papers, we as teachers should implement steps from the writing process to help student use writing strategies effectively in science.

What I would do is modeling how to do a sample of the expected writing and while modeling, I would talk aloud about the thinking that goes on while preparing to write and during writing; brainstorming ideas through mini-lessons or whole class discussions, then have students practice the strategy in small groups with me or with partners, providing feedback on the work, encouraging students to become more independent in their practices as they build their skills.

I would include reflections, questions, predictions, claims linked to evidence and/or conclusions when they write. By making these personal connections, students begin to challenge their prior misconceptions they may still have and start to develop an understanding of the scientific phenomena they are exploring in their studies.

From the materials and resources that were required in this activity of literacy module, the writing process is generally known to have five stages that are viewed as simultaneous: planning, prewriting, drafting, revision, and editing. All of these steps I working on implementing these in my future classroom and give the opportunity for my secondary students to be engaged by including them in most writing assignments or instructional units. 

From my observations of some classes, many science educators feel that students should already know how to write effectively when they come to their classrooms but this is not usually the case. Students have learned to write from their English teachers, but they do not know how to apply these skills in science. I believe that as a science teacher I must provide scaffolding for some strategies before students will be able to implement writing for learning science or demonstrate scientific knowledge. I would start with planning so they would think about a piece of writing and deciding on a general direction or topic; prewriting activities include outlining, mapping, listing and other tasks to facilitate or reflect thinking. Then I would let them write down their ideas then review and make changes in scientific word choice, organization, or details included and editing, correcting errors in grammar, and punctuation. When I work on a unit, I want to determine which writing science process skills can be developed during that unit.

Whole Language Learning Philosophy

We all know that all students do not bring the same kinds of knowledge, language habits, and strategies for learning to school. We as educators must recognize the tremendous heterogeneity to be found among our students and take responsibility for presenting all students with a range of options for organizing knowledge and using language.

Looking at the whole language as a way of thinking, teaching, and learning in a social community where learners are continually supported to use language (reading, writing, speaking, listening, thinking, drawing, making sense mathematically and scientifically, and so on) in order to inquire and to construct their own understanding of texts and real-world issues and to apply the conditions of language learning that we all use in the real world to the classroom. It provides children with a wide range of meaningful language and literacy experiences across the entire curriculum, includes evaluation and parent involvement and facilitates the development of responsible, cooperative, and caring individuals for whom language is a source of increasing empowerment.

From that point, I look back at my time during English classes, compared to what I am learning now about the whole language theory and the balanced literacy approach, I could identify the problems or bad habits existing in the teaching and learning processes that time and nowadays traditional classrooms. There are bad habits on the part of both the teachers and the students, as some teachers pay too much attention to grammar so what the students get from the text are only some grammar rules. They make little progress in reading skills, let alone listening, speaking, writing, and other skills.

Another bad habit is vocabulary-oriented; the teachers overemphasize the importance of vocabulary. When they deal with a text, the first and the most important thing to do is to teach new words, and explain their usage in the process of teaching the text. The students taught in this way will get nothing but new words from the text. Their reading ability cannot be improved effectively. Consequently, the teaching of reading will be likely unsuccessful. The students may have a very large vocabulary, but they can not communicate with the foreigners, nor can they understand a passage completely. 

The purpose of reading is to understand the passage well and to get useful information from it. If we just emphasize grammar or vocabulary and ignore the fact that language is a whole, it is impossible for us to understand the intention of the writer completely. Most of the information we get may be irrelevant. 
Grammar and vocabulary are just the necessary means of reading, but they are not the ends of reading. We should also realize that there are also some bad reading habits on the part of the students that affects the comprehension of the passage such as vocalizing means reading with pronunciation. The main cause of it is that the students lack training in silent reading. Another bad habit is being too dependent on dictionaries. we can imagine the frequent use of dictionaries and how the reading of the whole passage is interrupted because of that. So is the understanding of the information of the passage. These bad habits of both the teacher and the students have bad influences on the teaching of reading and reading comprehension. 

In whole language classrooms, where the teachers teach the language as a whole and provide the students with a lot of demonstrations by organizing and leading in group activities, discussing, reading and writing together with the students. Collaboration and support may take the form of peer editing, partner reading, collaborative research and writing, small-group work, and more. The important thing I have found is that the teachers take the students’ needs, aims, and interests of learning into consideration when they teach and try to arouse the students’ interest. That would influence the assessment and instruction to work together; self-evaluation, reflection, and goal setting are integral to daily instruction and practice. 

Students and teachers are constantly self-monitoring and reflecting-students are viewed as learners, not test takers. We want students to become active participants in a classroom literacy community by giving the students the chance to search, to get to know, and to summarize, select books they like to read, writing about, it is more about student-centered classrooms where learning is about the importance of sharing their knowledge and interests with others and understanding the social aspect of reading.

A Secondary Balanced Literacy Program, Strategic Instruction, and Best Practices

Teachers in multicultural and multilingual classrooms must recognize the importance of student diversity in order to build successful literacy environment. Effective reading and writing teachers understand learning theory, create a community of learners, scaffold student’s reading & writing experiences, and connect instruction to assessment while planning for instruction and assessment by considering their classroom environment and the diverse needs of their learners.

Throughout TEACH-NOW program and my school years, I have spent working on my lesson planning and preparing the needed materials, presentations for my lesson and digging in trying to find the best resources and activities for students to have them more engaged and enjoy the learning process. Actually I have learned a lot from TEACH-NOW modules -Module 8- specifically by applying all the skills that I have learned, even my videos editing/annotations, collaborating with my colleagues and my cohort peers; brainstorming ideas and strategies that I could implement in my lessons for my future science classroom.

This is my third year working as a shadow teacher for Grade 11 student in the American International School of Jeddah (AISJ) which established in 1952, it is a U.S. accredited Pre-­‐K-­‐12 college preparatory institution. It offers a rigorous American-­based curriculum serving a diverse student body through a holistic approach.

As part of AISJ team, we want each learner to be actively engaged in the pursuit of knowledge, demonstrates the active pursuit of dreams, and develops skills of a global citizen while actively contributing to the community by respecting diversity and showing empathy towards people of differing cultures and backgrounds, identifying needs and engaging independently or collaboratively in service for the best of self and community, reflecting on personal actions, taking responsibility, and applying critical thinking habits effectively to complex problems and situations to aspire toward continual self-improvement and life-long learning. 
I believe that to conduct that practical and effective approach, we must systematically review and appropriately modify and/or adapt our curriculum alignment, instructional practices, and assessments in order to achieve our school mission and create a balanced-literacy environment for learners.   

Nowadays, there are numerous ways to integrate reading and writing skills into a content area classroom. The strategies we will choose will depend on a variety of factors, including the subject matter, the lesson’s objective, and our student’s reading and writing abilities and weaknesses. As educators, we should consider an environment where students’ literacy skills are consequently improving along with their mastery of the content area by implementing appropriate strategies that will not have much of an impact unless we use them as part of a routine of best practice and keep in mind some general principles how to best meet the literacy.

A balanced approach to literacy development is essential for equipping students with strategic reading, writing, and analytical thinking skills. As I have mentioned before; providing daily opportunities to engage students in various reading, writing, speaking, and listening activities will help them become more literate and communicate more effectively. The integration of reading and writing skills would provide any classroom environment for students to enjoy reading and writing, explore new learning, deepen their thinking, ask and answer questions, and more importantly, develop lifelong learning.

In order to charge our own secondary classroom with appropriate literacy instructions, a balance should be attained through a combination of instructional strategies. A balanced literacy approach develops proficiencies of all students using a variety of tools, materials, resources, and strategies to meet individual literacy and learning needs that would release responsibility for learning from teachers to the student by having multiple ways to acquire knowledge, develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills.

Literacy instruction at the secondary level should support students to continue developing reading fluency, improving vocabulary knowledge; developing higher-level reasoning and thinking skills; improving reading comprehension strategies, and increasing student motivation and engagement with reading and writing (Torgerson et al., 2007).

It is evident that integrating literacy strategies into the science instructions program, modeling strategies that demonstrate how reading, writing, and discussion promote science literacy through using a collaborative group for reading, vocabulary development activities, and other practices will support literacy needs of science students. Let’s think about what reading and writing instruction looks like at the secondary level in a science classroom.

As we know that huge factor in literacy is learning to make connections between what we already know and the new information we are learning. Looking at the connection between science and literacy; language is essential for effective science learning:

• Supports clarity of thought, description, discussion, and argument.
• Students make meaning by writing, talking, and reading about science, especially when accompanied by a direct investigation of scientific phenomena.
• The ability to use language to form ideas, theorize, reflect, share, debate, and clearly communicate student’s acquisition of science concept and processes.
• The ability to use language to form ideas, theorize, reflect, share, debate, and clearly communicate the basic structure of student acquisition of science concepts and processes.

Some classroom practices that I have used during TEACH-NOW Clinical Practice were to make predictions to engage students by directing students to look at titles, subtitles, captions, make a prediction about what the text will be about, turn these pieces of text into questions, telling a partner what they think this is going to be about or what do they want to know, and then direct students to look at a picture or a graphic text and discuss with them the meaning of the picture or the graphic text -what is happening in it- to use this to build background knowledge for future learning because it helps students learn more about the world around them.

Using I do/we do/you do to scaffold reading and writing instructions. Students need to be taught to be a strategic thinker and effective readers who actively choose which reading/writing strategies to apply to which contexts. So I always start with direct teaching, thinking aloud, and modeling before moving to guided and/or shared reading & writing as discussion and small-group support that are necessary before asking students to independently complete reading/writing tasks or lab experiments. In science, lab experiences provide an opportunity for students to make the reading/writing connection through the recording of observations, predictions, and developing hypotheses. 

An example of what I was doing prior to doing a lab, students were taught useful vocabulary for discussing the concept or topic, keeping a journal of writing on topics related to the lab, writing exit slip and identifying questions they have about the topic, listen to think-aloud modeled by me doing a similar lab, and produce an independent lab report. So generally, students write books and reports in all of the content areas, as well as writing in student journals and notebooks. When needing a resource for more information, students use books/articles, computers, online resources and word walls, as well as teachers and peers for assistance.

Regarding effective writing instructional strategies that could be identified as best practice in science learning where every science student that includes:

• teaching composing processes (brainstorming, planning, drafting, conferencing, revising and editing) which reflect on many science processes (posing a question or making a claim, doing research, drafting a position, conferencing with others, revising and publishing results)
• summarization - identifying what is relevant and important to a topic/issue
• collaborative writing - using social interaction to frame thinking
• using technology in communicating findings
• inquiry activities - analyzing data to help develop ideas and content

Inquiry-based science encourages students to use higher order thinking skills and conduct investigations. Students need support with selecting tools, such as graphic organizers to collect information from text or experiments as they search for answers. Organizing their findings and thoughts through writing helps students summarize, synthesize, and reflect on what they have read or discovered during their investigative methods and cite their work using the proper citation methods.

I have created this Mindmap so you would find a detailed overview of instructional reading, writing, and communication strategies with best practices to help students to learn.

As it was shown in Mindmap and the image I have posted the components of Balanced Literacy, strategies, and practices with an overview of each instructional reading and writing strategies. We should keep in mind to use the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy while we are working with assessments and instructions in order to support the various components of balanced literacy. It focuses on the tasks that students need to complete in order to deepen their understanding.

Most of the practices have been applied during my clinical practice, students were given regular opportunities to work collaboratively and talk about their learning with others, thinking, communicating that would create a foster learning process.   

In Reading

I believe that reading growth does not stop at specific grade level or age, it continues to build our skills and background knowledge over our lifetimes. When the reader has limited background knowledge, comprehension remains limited. In order to achieve successful comprehension and effective reading experience, here are some practices to be used in class:

• Read Aloud/Modeled Reading that demonstrates proficient reading, expand access to text beyond student’s ability and exposes students to a variety of genres. And I believe that we should teach our students' comprehension strategies through “think aloud”, and gives them opportunities to practice using them. During my clinical practice, I used a variety of texts, not just the textbook, to teach the concepts of the content area.
• Shared Reading in which teacher and student choose text, they share reading and the teacher encourages the student to read when able.
• Interactive Read Aloud in which teacher models reading strategies, teaches reading strategies and extends understanding of the reading process and the teacher reads.
• Guided Reading in which teacher reinforces skills, engages students in questioning and discussion. The teacher acts as a guide and students read, practice strategies so they build independence and engage in meaningful conversations about what they are reading through the small group.
• Independent Reading where students choose the text, practice at their independent level by having time to practice demonstrates the value of reading.

Students should be taught appropriate comprehension strategies based on the text they are reading. We want the student to read like a scientist and we would get this by having a successful comprehension before, during and after reading. According to Think Literacy, “Effective readers use strategies to understand what they read before, during, and after reading”.

Before Reading

• Activating background knowledge, predicting text content and preview the text by skimming and scanning to get a sense of the overall meaning.

During Reading

• Understanding by questioning, thinking about and reflecting on the ideas and information in the text. It is more about student self-monitoring, summarizing, and clarifying key ideas.

After Reading

• Students would reflect upon the ideas and information in the text, clarify their understanding of the text and relate what they have read to their own experiences, knowledge and extend their understanding in critical and creative ways.

In Writing

Students in science must record observations, organize knowledge, link evidence to claims, draw conclusions, and make connections to what was learned. In order to achieve that, here are some practices to be used in class:

• Write Aloud/Modeled Writing by demonstrating proficient writing and expand access to writing beyond student’s ability while exposing them to a variety of genres.
• Shared Writing in which teacher and student choose a topic and students learn about the writing process through structured conversations.
• Interactive Writing where teacher and students compose writing together.
• Guided Writing where teacher reinforces skills and engages the student in questioning and discussion so the teacher would act as a guide and students do the writing and practice strategies while building independence.
• Independent Writing where students choose the topic and practice at their independent level to demonstrate the value of writing.

There are different resources that would be beneficial while implementing the balanced literacy approach in a secondary classroom such as "Teaching Science Literacy" article from Educational Leadership (ASCD), Reading Rockets, and I highly recommend reading this book "Literacy Strategies for Grade 4-12" by Karen Tankersley.

As educators, we should consider making parents part of the process, parents need to feel confident that what is going on in classrooms is right for their children, parents may need new knowledge and skills to work effectively with their children, and we need to support parents by consistently communicating in a variety of ways to provide them with strategies to increase of home reading/writing by using some websites or involved in a reading/writing project or workshops. Thinking about some non-English-speaking parents, we could share some translation sites on the internet that would be helpful in communicating with them.

In the end, I would say that we can no longer leave literacy development to language arts teachers, we must learn to model students’ thinking processes and assure learning to synthesize, evaluate, and process information in new ways using reading, writing, and critical thinking strategies to prepare them for the world outside. 

Future Trends, Opportunities and Challenges in Digital Learning

We can see today that the world is changing at a faster pace than ever before. Rapid change in technology, number of smartphone users, and evolving social media have changed the way people learn new things. Once thought of as just a part of resources, we have come to see how technology can be so much more than that. It can play a key role, and at times a leading role, in all elements of the teaching and learning environment. Traditional strategies such as "one size fit all" will not help anymore in our digital age.

It is interesting to predict what is going to be available for the next five or ten years! We are not only talking about hardware and software, it is also the science of learning and teaching from what I have read and which I believe that it is not simply knowing how to use technology that is important, in fact it is not even knowing how to teach with technology that we need - it is knowing how to teach effectively with technology.

I can see more virtual school will rise up to meet students where they are, wherever they are to provide appropriate learning environments for all learners using online platform, online collaboration tools, learning-management systems and enhanced video and presentation tools that would make the greatest contribution in improving educational quality over the next five years. 3D printers, sensor networks, virtual humans and other technologies that will drastically change our world in the decade to come.

In this audio link I will talk more about opportunities and challenges in digital learning, outlining a few possible technological changes that will impact education during our teaching career. How might this affect our teaching? The role of a teacher in general? The learning environment? School design and operation?

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9QxvmWTovUobFVnczU2UjI1bnM

A Case for Using Mobile Devices

Mobile Learning is emerging as one of the solutions to the challenges faced by education. With a variety of tools and resources always available, mobile learning provides increased options for personalization of learning. Mobile learning in classrooms often has students working interdependently, in groups, or individually to solve problems, to work on projects, to meet individual needs, and to allow for student voice and choice. With access to so much content anytime and anywhere, there are plenty of opportunities for learning, both inside and outside the classroom.

From my interviews with some students, they say that it is easier to use their mobile device to improve their access to information. Students are confident that with their mobile devices, they will be able to find anything they want to find, right at the time they need, it helps them achieve general information on the internet or it's information related to their course faster. Students can read their course materials on their smartphones which are more lightweight than books and PCs, rather than have to go to the computer labs. That means that technology provides a whole new opportunity for doing things in a different way.

As teachers we must plan for the creative use of these technologies in the classroom, we should keep in our mind some questions regarding using the standards and the learning objectives to creatively integrate mobile learning to allow for deeper students learning and enhance student-centered learning and reinforce the targeted learning outcomes. When we make lesson plans, we should plan ahead and critically think about ways to integrate this type of mobile learning into the curriculum, so that it would not distract or result in missing those learning opportunities or goals. It is important to implement formative assessments or creatively assessing students acquisition of the content and to keep in mind what is the students' prior knowledge of this digital age content, what specific preparation that needs to be done before the lesson like polling students in the class before about specific application and their familiarity with it. By knowing student's ability beforehand, we could properly integrate the mobile technology during the lesson to use class time efficiently.

Another thing that every teacher can do is to brainstorm and research for new apps and methods to achieve the objective of the lesson. If students need to spend too much time familiarizing themselves with the software or application we should take a step back and double check the use of mobile in this lesson considering what we want for students to deepen their knowledge and develop 21st century skills. In some cases, skills could be developed more effectively by using low-tech methods, sometimes meaningful group discussion would work more. That is why a teacher should be prepared to allow or require students to use mobile devices to achieve learning objectives.

Science students are expected to support their learning and do what they need to do with mobile phones, handheld devices and other wireless equipment like using images and video captured on mobile phones cameras for experimental observations and document each step in their experimental procedure with digital images to include in their lab reports that provide a chance for both teachers and students to retrieve the material and to reflect on the evidence captured over time. students could upload the images onto their laptops and post them onto their e-portfolio.

Mobile devices could support the delivery of instructions on how to do a scientific experiment by sending students a video showing them step-by-step the instructions how to carry out the scientific experiment. By viewing it students can understand the procedure clearly rather than understanding by listening to verbal instructions or reading a worksheet. At the same time, teacher can assess students by viewing their videoed observation what they had recorded and provide the necessary feedback to them further instructions if necessary and ask students to reflect on what they had recorded using an audio recorder so they could identify their errors and correct them immediately. We do not forget that during any scientific experiment/activity, using a stopwatch, timer, and calculator are essential every cell phone has them they are simple but effective when completing some activities.

Using mobile device's camera, image storage and Bluetooth would support teachers planning and students in their science lessons by bringing the outside world into the classroom which I believe that would enhance students' science understanding and engagement.

During my clinical practice I was able to implement some technologies to get my students engaged and have fun with their mobile devices and/or tablets using concept review game to flush out any misconception students might have at the beginning of each lesson and they were able to take notes with their devices, passing them during class and send them directly by email or submit onto learning management system that we use to save time. Some issues might arise because not every student has a cell phone. The easiest way to work around this is to have students working in groups, collaborating and solving problems together, we might only need one mobile device to report out group work. I always try to have a backup plan in case things do not go as planned or something goes wrong with the technology.

In addition to what have mentioned above about some best practices to offer learners an enriching learning experience focusing on pedagogical aspects, here are other best practices for mobile devices: 

1. Creating an outline of the mobile learning content which includes the primary learning objectives and goals reviewing the material for that lesson with having the mobile device in your mind.
2. It is essential for mobile learning content to be brief because the display screen on mobiles and tablets is smaller than a laptop. In case the topic is detailed we could break the information down that would facilitate learners to understand the information quickly.
3. All the mobile learning content should be engaging, promoting, facilitating interactions and collaborations between students.
4. When creating the mobile learning, we ensure that it can be accessed on all platforms and devices.
5. Evaluate the mobile learning content on various mobile devices to confirm and ensure its readability to be used in the lesson and always reflect after implementing new idea with the students.

As a new teacher, I plan to create a list of guiding questions in the future to help guide my implementation of mobile technology into the classroom. I look forward to using mobile devices in my future science middle or high school classrooms. As I mentioned in some of my reflections that mobile learning is evolving, and with more research and resources, I can implement this strategy to help develop 21st century skills while addressing the required standards and content.

by viewing it students can understand the

procedure clearly rather than understanding by listening to verbal instructions or

reading a worksheet.

by viewing it students can understand the

procedure clearly rather than understanding by listening to verbal instructions or

reading a worksheet.

by viewing it students can understand the

procedure clearly rather than understanding by listening to verbal instructions or

reading a worksheet.

by viewing it students can understand the

procedure clearly rather than understanding by listening to verbal instructions or

reading a worksheet.

by viewing it students can understand the

procedure clearly rather than understanding by listening to verbal instructions or

reading a workshee