Partnership for 21st Century Skills

After visiting the Partnership for 21st Century Skills website, http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/index.php, I feel even more compelled to incorporate technology into my curriculum. I was very impressed with how dedicated the board members and staff were to increasing the amount of technology used in classrooms around the United States. What's even more impressive is how there are already states that are using the initiatives set by this website and incorporating them into their educational standards and school buildings. Dr. Thornburg listed all of the 21st century skills and dispositions in the video this week. He also mentioned STEM skills and how students going into the workforce today and in the future will need to have these essential skills. The Partnership further emphasized these skills and stated "all students must have STEM education to acquire 21st century skills." It doesn't matter if a student is going into technical or non-technical occupations; STEM skills help students possess problem solving and analytical thinking skills. Something surprising to me was that there are only ten states that have adopted the site's initiative to incorporate 21st century skills into their educational standards. I would have expected more states to incorporate these skills, especially with NCLB in effect. When your students are supposed to perform on grade level, I would think that getting them any kind of assistance would be the number one priority. This past year, my school was below AYP expectance in regard to the NCLB standards on our state assessment. Now, we are on "probation" for 2 years and the state has given us $40,000 to spend over the 2 years on programs that could help our students achieve AYP and increase their state assessment scores. Why is this money only given when schools fail? It should be given every year, no matter if a school failed or prospered. I was reading some of the articles on the website and found an article about the West Virginia state superintendent and how he "revamped the state's content standards and objectives to emphasize these skills" found on the website. He then created new jobs across the state's school districts so that they had a technology coordinator/instructor for each district who could instruct the teachers in how to use the new technology they were given in the classroom. I wish that every state had a person like him who was dedicated to getting their students the best (technological) education available, no matter what the cost. He is now hoping to put a technology instructor in each school building. I wish that Missouri would adopt the initiative and take action like ten other states have already done. The implication for myself, as a contemporary educator, is to teach my students as many 21st century skills that I can. I will never allow myself to be pulled into teaching only the original way of teaching (worksheets, lectures, and note taking). Granted, there are times when time runs out and we have to use these methods; however, present times call for present and future ways of teaching. Our students are not going to be writing notes in their jobs. They will be typing up PowerPoint presentations and giving speeches to their colleagues over video teleconferencing. If they don't learn how to do this now, then they will never learn how to do it and will end up losing the top job to a person whose school took the time to incorporate these essential skills. The implication for my students is that they get a teacher who wants to incorporate 21st century skills into his/her curriculum so that the students can get a well rounded education that truly does help them develop into model citizens and future employees.

First time

This is my first time blogging and I am doing this for a Master class. This will be very interesting to see how this works. Thanks for visiting my blog. Enjoy!

Blogging in the Classroom

Ever since this class started, I have been very intrigued with the idea of incorporating blogging in my fourth grade classroom. Next year, the three fourth grade teachers are going to departmentalize math, science, and social studies. I am the teacher who will be taking social studies for all the classes. I really want to incorporate blogging into the curriculum so that all three classes can communicate on a specific question or topic that we talk about. I have thought about what I could do and I decided that I would create a blog site for my students. Every two weeks, I would post a question about the topic that we are discussing and the students would be responsible for posting their answer and responding to other's comments. Not all of my students have internet access, so those that have access could do this at home and those that don't could complete this at school in their classrooms when they have free time. Using a blog would enhance my lessons and curriculum by allowing the students to use higher depth of knowledge thinking skills to answer the question and also to learn skills in responding to others in a mature manner. I can't wait to try this out next year. If anyone else has other ideas that I could use for blogging in a social studies curriculum for fourth grade, I would appreciate your input.