Evaluating 21st-Century Skills

The Partnership for 21^st Century Skills (www.p21.org) is an organization that has specific benchmarks for skills they consider necessary for today’s students.  The major outcome and support systems they believe are core subjects, life and career skills, learning and innovation skills, and information, media, and technology skills.  They seem to focus on the core subjects (3 Rs).  It surprises me that the focus is not on technology since we are becoming so advanced in technology.  However, I know that the core subjects are extremely important. 

I noticed that my home state of Michigan is not listed under State Initiatives.  We must not be on board with P21.  I feel that some of the skills listed on the website are not the school’s responsibility to teach children.  I believe that children should learn a lot about life from their parents.  I feel responsible for educating my students but many life and career skills should be learned elsewhere.  There is not enough time in the school year to focus on all of this in my classroom.  Some responsibility needs to be taken at home. 

Blogging in my classroom

Blogs would be a perfect tool to utilize in my high school Computers 2 classroom.  Not only will it introduce the concept of a blog to them, but we will be using to do something that we already do but differently.  Currently, students participate in a journal entry the first ten minutes of class.  Students find the journal prompt in the computers shared drive, respond to the blog in a word document containing one week's journals, and then save on their personal drive.  To check these, I can either access their personal drive from my computer or I can ask students to open their files and I walk around (the faster method).  I plan to change the journal the assignments to be completed on a blog.  I will post the journal prompt on my blog and they can respond to it on there. I can add a component where students have to respond one of their peer's response.  I think this technique will lead to student's writing improving.  Students will be accountable for what they write because it is posted on the Internet.  Their peers, parents and the entire world have access to their response.  I am really excited to use blogs in my classroom!

Welcome!

Welcome to my first blog!  I hope to use this blog to share my adventures of teaching with technology.  My district is constantly getting more technology for us to use in our classrooms and I love exploring new technology! Stay tuned for updates!