I am currently realizing the importance of teaching our students 21 Century Skills to better prepare them for the future. I began exploring the website Partnership for 21st Century Skills. This website has emerged as the leading advocacy organization for implementing 21st century skills into education. What they are trying to do at this website is bring together leaders in the business community, and educational leaders to come up with a vision for 21st century education to help our students become successful citizens and workers in the 21st century. Their goal is to get schools, districts, and states the tools and resources necessary to change the current ways of teaching, and help implement technology and 21st century skills into education. In short, they are trying to get the U.S. to align classroom environments with real world environments by implementing 21st century skills into the classroom.
This website talks about the gap between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need 21st century communities and workplaces. I feel that this is a very good website. It is easy to navigate from topic to topic, and there is very useful information on this website. From this article you have access to many articles and videos on the subject matter. Even better, you have access to the states that are already involved in the program, and you have access to their goals and standards. From reading these you get a better idea of how some of these programs are being assessed and you get an idea of how some states are redesigning their schools to infuse some of these new skills.
I feel this websites is not only a good website, but it also is pushing the schools in the right direction. It gets the creative juices flowing, and as it gains support will have a profound affect on education in the future.
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Hi Michael,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that the Partnership For 21st Century Skills is a very informative website. I went back to look at the information again on each state’s mission after reading your comments and found that there was more to the resources there that I did not look at yet.
There is quite a bit of information on 21st century learning on this website, however, I did find it a bit overwhelming navigating through it. I found one resource, North Carolina in the world (http://www.ncintheworld.org/ ), which has a great deal of teaching resources that you can search through. It will take me some time just searching through this particular resource from the Partnership For 21st Century Skills.
Demonstrating what Dr. Thornburg said about collaboration, I think it can be very helpful when more than one person is searching the same information to point out things you might have missed.
Michael,
ReplyDeleteI agree with the idea that this site is giving teachers a key to start with trying to integrate more technology into the classroom. The site had many ideas that could be used in the classroom. It takes a lot of time to be able to sort through the information that is given on the website.
I also liked that you mentioned the gap that has been created between what the students know and what they will need to know for the future. There are many interesting points that can be discussed on how to bridge this gap. This website, gives the educator a great resource to begin to bridge the gap.
I also thought that this was a very informative website. There is quite a bit of information that seems overwhelming at first, but there is a consistent logic to where the information can be found. As educators, we have to get input from industry. If we are trying to prepare students with skills to be productive citizens, we have to know what skills are needed. No longer is it enough to be a hard worker and a team player, now the students have to be able to work alone, collaborate across distances and know how to effectively process different types of information.
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