PARTNERSHIP FOR 21st CENTURY SKILLS

"Preparing students for the 21st century" is a phrase on the lips of school administrators everywhere. Our own suburban New York high school principal has asked study groups of staff members to form to study the question - Are we preparing our students for the 21st century? As an assignment for my Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society grad. school class, I visited the website: http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/. They are the self described "...leading advocacy organization infusing 21st century skills into education."
I watched an interesting YouTube video link to a speech by president Ken Kay expressing ideas every teacher would agree with, specifically that all students deserve both "world class content and world class skills." I agree with their basic premise and many of their ideas appear to be sound ones. Weaving curricula together through interdisciplinary themes and adding global awareness into the core curricula should be features of all schools today. More lessons on Learning and Innovation, and Information, Media and Technology Skills seem in order to prepare our students for a different future than we were prepared for.
I was inspired and intrigued to read what they had to say yet found myself frustrated by the web site they had created. As I navigated the site I was constantly redirected to the colorful logo any business executive would love. Called the "framework for 21st century teaching and learning", it is a bit obscure -- a rainbow on a pedestal labelled with terms that need defining and complex ideas that deserve elaboration. Browsing Resources I consistently hit walls - The link 21st Century Information Fluency/Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy took me to a page explaining how the info is now proprietary. The link 21st Century Skills and ePortfolio High School Curriculum took me to a page that linked me to a sakai to join. But I perservered and found the link -http://www.cellt.org/diglib titled "For Immediate Download" and there were pdf files of interesting lessons to try.
This project shows that important work is underway studying and exploring how we can best prepare students for this centiry of innovation and comminucation and could be a useful resource for contemporary educators. The biggest change I would appreciate and advocate for is the focus on Life and Career skills of flexibility, adaptation, initiative, self-direction, productivity and accountability. These skills are highly prized and lacking in many high school students in my classes. Interestingly, they are not skills that require high tech tools to teach either.

Found a cool website for seeing the art in science - great for providing visual stimulation and prompts for conversations about science
www.princeton.edu/artofscience/2009

Using Blogs in Chemistry Class

I enter my classroom each morning, ask each 10th or 11th grade student to put their cell phone away. By 7:30 atleast one student has received a text message too tempting to ignore and slyly reads it under their desk. These are the students of the "communication age" a term developed by Dr. David Thornburg.
Instead of fighting their technical prowess on a cell phone, laptop or desktop, I could enter the communication age and invite them to apply their interest in social networking to the learning of the subject at hand -- NY State Regents' Chemistry. Designing a blog for my chemistry classes to read and post to would serve several purposes. If we use our classroom blog to collaborate, each student could post a chemistry problem, solve it, and explain how they solved it. This would allow all students to:
- Practice defining and explaining their problem solving strategies.
- Explore and work through their own thinking and put it into wordsin their posting, improving their metacognition in the process.
- Examine how their peers are solving the same problems, possibly seeing different problem strategies for the same or similar problems.
- Interact with other problem solvers.
- Use the collection of problems as review before tests or the final exam.
- Post links to online chemistry resources.

Using the Web to Enhance Learning

So, where were we? Educators are preparing our students for the 21st Century. Children beginning school today will enter a world where there are more honors students in India than we even have students in the U.S. So what does the future of education look like in the U.S.? In the near future it will involve a massive increase in the inclusion and use of the world wide web in America's classrooms. What's more , students will necessarily move from reading the web - like using browsers and search enginges to find info-- into writing the web by creating blogs, social spaces, wikis and even changing the info that is searched and gathered. Web evangelist Will Richardson in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other powerful Web Tools for Classrooms spells it all out, "(students) are no longer limited to being independent readers or consumers of information; as we'll see, (they) can be collaborators in the creation of large storehouses of information." (2009,2)
A course in blogging , wiki management, or podcast training? Which teachers or librarians will take this on? Will all teachers have to? Will it be as essential as reading and writing across the curriculum?