Some more on the Partnership for 21st Century Skills

I had another chance to look through the website and found the The Mile Guide. A comprehensive plan on how to implement 21st century skills not only into the curriculum, but into the education process as a whole. It stresses the need to for students to master the core subjects, and as an English teacher I can appreciate that. Often I have students ask the age old question of "why do I need to learn this?" My response is always the same, "English is a cross curricular subject and we take the skills we master here and apply them to mathematics and science and everything else we do."

It seems in today's world students want everything now, but don't want to take the necessary steps to get there. We as educators have a tremendous task before us. Unlike in generations past where teaching basic skills was often the norm, we are now in need of finding ways to merge the working world with the world of education. I really feel it is paramount for our students to get all of these skills and the partnership for the 21st century is an innovative website that begins to address these issues.

The Mile guide is a great starting point for assessing where a school district is in this process and where they need to be going. We all need to "Empower the people network" more in education. In the short while I have been teaching I have learned one thing, put the power to learn in the hands of those being taught and they will begin to discover new concepts on their own. I believe in the old saying, "it takes a village to raise the young", maybe in the 21st century we will one day say, "it takes the whole globe to teach the young."

Partnership for the 21st Century Skills

My initial response was that this could be another helpful resource for educators, but as I went deeper, I began to understand the importance of the web site. Many others like it offer a wealth of information and resources to guide teachers in the 21st century, but this site seems to be focused more on creating an initiative to achieve these skills. Offering a visitors the opportunity to interact and submit ideas is a great jumping off point for getting people involved. Collaboration is truly going to be the key for the modern learner.

I was a little dissapointed not to see my state involved. What did impress me though was that there seems to be some investors on board. Without proper funding we won't achieve anything, take for example the No Child Left Behind Act.

This reminded me of piece I listned to on NPR a while back. They were discussing an inititive that got high school aged students placed in real working environment in order to expose them to the real world skills and critical thinking. These opportunites, much like what the Partnership is advocating, is providing skills that studetns will use in the future. It simply amazed me to learn that our studetns spend only about 15 minutes per week using technology in our schools compared to what how much time they will be spending with technology in the workplace. The gap needs to be tightened not widened and maybe a project such as this can help.

The implications for this project could be enormous, but it will remain to be seen if we can get everyone on board. We are often mired by the politics of everything when it comes to inititives that are all encompassing.

Weblogs and Education

I would like to use my blog in my classroom as a tool for my class to communicate with other students. Students could use the read/write web as a way to share ideas on a common unit or theme with other students from around the globe. Providing students the opportunity to share information with a world wide audience could have tremendous learning power for students in the 21st century.

From what I have recently learned blogs serve a vast array of learning purposes from improving the technical aspects of writing to critical thinking about the world around them.

A good blog could showcase polished pieces of writing that students wish to share with an audience that extends to the farthest reaches of one's imagination. A good blog could also serve the purpose of storing information and written work. As stated in this weeks reading teachers have been able to incorporate a variety of outside sources to share and comment on the content of a web page. It would also serve as a great place for teachers to find, share, and express new ideas.

Blogging can truly bring a lesson to life. Being able to interact with all that is readily available on the Internet; incorporating pictures, video clips, speeches from the past, and the list goes on and on. I believe it would also play a role in improving student writing because they now realize how many people would have access to their content, even if it was just classmates.

I am a teacher of English at the 9th and 10th grade level at Lapeer West High School in Lapeer, MI. My rational for teaching with a blog not only introduces studetns to an element of technology that is here to stay, it also is a way to contibute knowledge for others to analyze. The ability to archive and in turn quickly retrieve student work for the sake of reflection and rethinking will greatly enhance student learning and teacher development. But this is just the tip of the ice berg, the opportunities seem quite limitless.

Hello to all of my fellow WaldenU students. Welcome to my first ever blog.