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.
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Before I began this course I never really thought about using or implementing technology in my physical education classroom. Now I'm excited about implementing the use of technology with my middle school students in the gym. Here is one idea I plan on implementing with my students. I plan on breaking the students up into groups and give them a different exercise. They must video someone in their group doing the exercise correctly. I will give the students a day to go to computer lab and let them find things on the internet showing the correct way to do the exercises. I will give them another day to go back and change anything that is needed in their videos. After all the groups do their exercises I will bring the class together and we will watch and critique each group. Hopefully this is the beginning of implementing the 21st century skills into my curriculum.
ReplyDeleteI think you are right on that educators are going to have to take this issue into their own hands if they want to see a quick implementation. In fact, I believe many teachers already teach many 21st century skills and may not even realize it. Teaching 21st century skills does not necessarily mean taking on a whole new curriculum to teach, but, rather, an improved way to teach our current curriculum. From an educator's point-of-view, I think teaching in interactive, project-based activities is so much more fun and the students seem to feel the same way. They are more attentive and excited about learning. On the down side, we are all going to have our own set of hurdles to overcome, as each district has varying degrees of technology and each has their own limitations. For example, my district currently blocks the use of blogs. However, I think I may be able to use what I have learned in this class to help them see the benefits of blogging to the point in which maybe they will begin to reconsider some of their current restrictions. Overcoming one hurdle at a time will eventually get us to the finish line.
ReplyDeleteYou are so right. I was disappointed not to see Connecticut on the list for partnerships, but I am still able to implement technology on my own in my classroom. Our school district does a good job with keeping our students up to date with all the skills they need outside of school. We constantly have workshops during teacher development days, or we will have programs after school to learn the newest programs we can use with our students.
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