21st Century Skills

As an educator I feel it my responsibility to prepare my students to be successful in life. That is one of the main reasons I became a teacher- I want to impact the future by preparing today's children for it. As a life long learner myself, I have been learning a lot lately about the skills that our children are going to need in order to be successful in such a technological society. Unfortunately, there seems to be a huge gap between the advancements of technology in society and in the classroom.

To help close this gap and prepare our students for the 21st century, there is an organization called the Partnership for 21st century skills. The program currently runs in 14 states. This week I spent some time investigating their website and found it to be informative. The partnership helps to fund the development of such skills as creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration to name a few. They have a framework of all the 21st century skills they stress posted on their website.

I was very surprised at the amount of corporate sponsors backing this project. The volume and nature of the sponsors show that businesses are aware of the need for our students to become capable in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math (Laureate,2008). We are currently not producing enough capable people in the work force in these areas, leading to the outsourcing of these jobs to countries with a ready work force.

If partnerships like this one work its way into my state, our daily classroom lives will change pretty dramatically. The focus of teaching will not just be reading, writing and math, but also a strong focus on technology, life and career skills. We'll start to see more project based work, emphasizing the use of collaborating and a much more wide spread use of technologies such as web 2.o. Teaching will become more group focused and inquiry based. I wonder which will come first: Changes in what and how we teach leading to changes in our standards and state tests or changes in our standards and state tests leading us to change what and how we teach. If my past experience has taught me anything, it is that nothing moves slower than getting classroom policy to change.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2008). Skills for the 21st century. [Motion picture]. Baltimore: Author.

How can I use blogging in my classroom?

I have been thinking about how I might use a blog in my classroom. Blogs are a powerful tool in the instructional setting in so many ways: reading, writing, collaborating with people across the globe, and archiving and sharing student work (Richardson, 2009). Since I am a kindergarten teacher I feel somewhat limited in the ways I will be able to use a blog in my class. Since they are just learning how to write phonetically, I don't feel it practical to have a blog where students write themselves. Because of this I am struggling with ways to use a blog within a lesson. I see my use of a blog as more of a communicative tool.

I would like to start a classroom blog as a way to post student work, and communicate with parents. It would keep parents updated on homework, and upcoming school activities. As a class we could even write a summary of our day together and post it so that parents know what we did that day. I will be sure to include links to websites that have good educational games on them so that students can get extra support in a fun way.

Another use for my classroom blog is to find a classroom we can be blog pals with. A technological twist on the traditional pen pal. It could be educational for my students to learn about what life is like for children outside of the the small community they live in.

Currently, if we have extra time in our day we will research a topic on the internet that my students want to know more about- for example animals, and bugs. When I get better at blogging, I can have my students post questions to the general public about things they want to know about and see what kinds of responses we get. Students might even chose to research the topic at home and post a response with their family.

My question to anyone who might be reading this is simple: what are some different grade level appropriate ways I can use a blog in my classroom of kindergarteners? While I have no problem imagining the uses of this technology for older students I am stumped for ideas of to use blogs in my own situation. I would be appreciative of any ideas.

Richardson, W. (2006). Blogs, wiks, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

my first blog

Hello to all of you who are looking at my blog page. I do not know exactly what I should write in my first blog post, so I will keep it short. To my Walden classmates I look forward to chatting with you on this new medium for the next seven weeks!