Developing the teach21 online authoring tool supporting primary school teachers in designing 21st century design based education

Students need to learn '21st century skills'. However, teaching materials for this are scarce. Moreover 21st century teaching is adaptive and teachers often need to design teaching materials themselves. Design Based Learning (DBL) is a promising approach for teaching 21^st century skills. This paper describes the development of a tool to support primary school teachers in creating 21^st century skills teaching materials, DBL materials in particular. After defining initial requirements, the study moves on as 'design research' comprising iterative design rounds. The resulting tool largely fulfils the stakeholders' and teachers' expectations, supports teachers in creating 21st century education and activates teacher reflection, even though it does not yet produce classroom ready material. To be effective in promoting DBL, it is necessary to further elaborate the concept of DBL and to supplement it with an explicit pedagogical strategy and concrete assessment procedures.