Twenty-First Century Classrooms

As technology and collaboration continue to become intertwined with the business world, it becomes increasingly important that school districts and individual teachers begin to incorporate and infuse these two things in the classroom. If we do not, how are students expected to succeed when they enter a world that relies so heavily on technology and collaboration to complete everyday tasks? I was introduced to an interesting organization called the "Partnership for 21st Century Skills", whose homepage is located at http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/index.php. This organization has essentially created a new educational structure that integrates 21st century skills (created by them) with the traditional k-12 content. The suggestion they are giving is that schools begin to look at doing this themselves in order to most successfully prepare their students for the world they will grow up in.

The website itself is setup very professionally and lists companies and organizations they have partnered up with to set up standards and to promote this type of education including companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Pearson to name a few. I think that because of these partnerships, you can give legitimacy to the suggestions given by this organization because they have created their new, 21st century standards in accordance with some major players in today's economy and also in the educational field.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself that your district would never take on such a potentially expensive and challenging task as this in the near future. However, if that is the case, you, as an individual teacher have all the capabilities to do this yourself and I would imagine that some of you already have taken measures suggested by this organization into your own hands. By taking measures to attack project based learning assessments and technological enhanced lessons, you can make steps to prepare students to succeed in the 21st century. If you have a computer lab or library you can find a way to incorporate numerous technology based assignments such as blogs, wikis and podcasts into the daily routines of your classroom.

I highly suggest you take a look at this website and see what it is offering because not only do I believe that the ideas are interesting, I believe that more and more schools are going to gradually begin to adopt and integrate these ideas into their curriculum.

Using A Blog in the Classroom

As a newcomer to the use of blogs, I am intrigued by the thought of using a blog in the classroom on a regular basis and have come up with an idea for how to utilize this tool in a high school setting. The school I regularly substitute at is lucky in the fact that every single student in the school has their own MacBook Laptop for their own use. Therefore, something like a weekly blog would fit into their classrooms very easily. However, I think that even without this privilege, you could still utilize a weekly blog that requires students to read and respond to.

I am certified to teach grades 7-12 social studies and will therefore use a social studies class as my backdrop for this idea, even though it could easily be modified to fit any content area. My idea is simple, based on the given weeks overall theme, the teacher will post an entry on the blog on Sunday night. Included in this post would be a brief summary of what is going to be covered that week along with examples of the content including (but not limited to) images, video clips, vocabulary or relevant articles.

Student's will then have until Tuesday night to review the new posting and respond to either a series of suggested questions or of their overall feelings on the subject at hand, depending on how the content can be best utilized. I believe that this could be of great tool to be utilized in the classroom and would love to hear any other recommendations or critiques of this idea.

In my opinion, this idea would serve multiple purposes in the classroom. First of all, it would be a good way to expose students to the week's concepts and lessons so that they are aware of what they are going to learn. Second, it is good practice for them to utilize the internet in a professional and educational way. I believe this would be a very effective way to utilize technology in the classroom.