Partnership for 21st Century Skills

My initial reaction to the website was one of admiration. It is refreshing to see a coalition of organizations band together to promote twenty-first century skills; however, as I examined the site, that's about all it does. Booklets are offered to describe twenty-first century skills along with additional standards the are designed to work with our state standards to promote collaborative learning and so forth, which is great except most teachers already practice this. These standards should be aimed more at the state and what needs to be promoted.

I am surprised by the lack of practical resources. Yes, it was informative in regards to the need to implement twenty-first century thinking practices and technological experience that businesses are looking for, however there is a surprising lack of resources to help implement this. Yes, there are the booklets, however they only outline what the needs are and offer little advise as to how to reach it. I even surfed over to their link for Apple Professional Development, and their site had more of the same thing: pdfs that state what twenty-first century skills are, but offer little resource to help obtain those goals.

While I was searching this site I was expecting to find a resource area similar to the wikis we created the prior week, that is a collection of online resources. I was expecting more resources in the form of websites or freeware that utilized a greater verity of technological resources such as OpenOffice. There are several sections that state technology and twenty-first century skills should support the lesson and I agree, I was just hopping to see a few more tools that can aid teachers. Also, I am surprised there is not a page specifically designated to offering grants related to technology and Twenty-First Century skills. It takes money to help run a classroom and in this economy any grant would be welcome.

As for any implications between what this website states teachers need to do to promote twenty-first century skills and my students and myself I see some changes, but not much. As I stated, many teachers are pushing collaborative learning and creative thinking. My students have been interacting more with technology in regards to using e-mail to turn in assignments. Frankly, this course will have a greater impact on my students than Partnership for 21st Century Skills. While this group of people push for teachers to use it, they provide little resources to support their mission for teachers to utilize or at least, resources that go beyond stating what twenty-first century skills are.

Application Response

I teach both ninth and tenth grade students in Language Arts and blog would be a great tool for my class. Often times when we read a novel my class runs out of time for discussion. I could post a weakly question on the blog for students to respond to. Students can comment on my question or post questions or post thoughts and respond to each other’s posts. This way, every student has participated in the discussion rather than two or three students. All must participate and all will have a voice.

The blog would help add some depth to the lesson as students realize technology has practical uses beyond MySpace and Facebook. Also, with their work posted students might be more careful with structuring their sentences and double checking their spelling. In our course material for this week Kathy Martin discussed how bloging has begun to make students more aware of how they present themselves on the internet.