I spent some time exploring the Partnership for 21st Century Skills website, http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/ and was amazed by the sheer magnitude of information that I could access. At first, I found the website to be difficult to negotiate until I dug deeper. On the home page, there was only one page of information and it did not seem very impressive but then I went into the Resources and opened up several sites that focused on 21st Century Skills. I especially like the SOS for Informational Literacy, http://www.informationliteracy.org/ that gave examples of lessons using informational literacy skills. The resources range from K-12 and beyond; it focuses on some interesting topics for students and strategies for incorporating them into the curriculum. There were so many sites to check out that I will be very busy visiting them and finding out how I can put them to good use.
What surprised me about this website was the states that are involved with this initiative and more importantly, the states that were not listed. It was very interesting to look at the different companies and corporations that supported this project. The fact that big business supports education should come as no surprise since their future rests on the education of their workforce.
The implications that 21st century skills have for my students are far-reaching. Hopefully, school will start to look and feel different to them. They will be more engaged, more involved in their learning, and more interactive. Change needs to happen soon so they can increase their informational literacy skills. They need to learn how to cooperate, collaborate, and communicate in a global society. As for myself, I need to change as well. Blogs, wikis, and interactive learning need to have a place in my classroom. I hope to incorporate more group work so my students learn how to work in a team, problem-solve, and think outside the box.
What other ideas can we use to integrate 21st century skills into our classroom?
Thursday, July 23, 2009
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Kerry,
ReplyDeleteI too found the Partnership for 21st Century Skills website to be overwhelming. When looking through the various pages on the site, I found many different links to other websites. However, the sites that I looked at seemed to only have programs for educators and administrators to purchase in order to incorporate 21st century skills within the classroom. I am very interested to revisit the site and view the link for the SOS for Informational Literacy. It is very helpful to an educator to be able to read through a variety of lessons and sample activities that focus on skills such as teamwork, leadership, and information technology. This assists educators in transitioning their pedagogy and thought process to include the skills necessary for students to thrive within the classroom and our global society, as Dr. David Thornburg stated in the DVD segment, "Skills for the 21st Century".
As a whole educators by nature are lifelong learners; therefore, classroom activities, lessons, and assessments will constantly be updated to suit the needs of our children. Classrooms will look different and will include more opportunities for students to collaborate with each other and utilize a variety of technologies. I am excited for what is ahead of me and my students this upcoming school year.
Again, thank you for enlightening me about the SOS for Informational Literacy website. I appreciate it.
Heather Streb
Resources
Laureate Education Inc. (Producer). (2008). Skills for the 21st century. [Motion picture]. Baltimore: Dr. David Thornbury & Dr. Chris Dede.
What surprises me as I sit here and think after reading your post… if all of these people can see this clearly why is education taking so long to change? Then I think about what we saw in the DVD segments a few weeks ago. Our society is still affected by and following the calendar of the agricultural society and the daily schedule of the industrial society (Laureate Education DVD, 2008). Our nation is slowly making changes in their weekly work schedule to save resources by shortening the work week to four days in office with one day or more from home. Our business industry affects our world tremendously so now that the business world is pushing strongly for more inter-personal skills (Bates and Phelan, 2002) perhaps education will listen and as the business world starts to interact in various technological ways, society will most likely embrace it more easily.
ReplyDeleteFor now though educators need to continue to grow and as we attempt to develop our students critical thinking and communication skills (Laureate Education DVD, 2008) to make them successful, competitive candidates for the international job market.
RESOURCES:
Bates, R., & Phelan, K. (2002). Characteristics of a globally competitive workforce. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 4(2), 121.
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2008). Understanding the impact of technology on education, work, and society. Baltimore: Author.
I am so impressed with the SOS for Information Literacy site that you found on the P21 website. What a helpful resource for classroom use! However, I would like to speak to another comment you made in your post: "I found the website to be difficult to negotiate." I think you are reading my mind; I still cannot find the SOS for Information Literacy link anywhere in P21's website. I have looked several times. In fact, each time I go into another submenu on their site, more and more areas to visit appear, and I find it entirely confusing. Kudos for finding something that helps all that theoretical information become a little more teacher-friendly and classroom-applicable.
ReplyDeleteI also hope that school begins to look quite different for our young learners. Even though we are working with children at young ages (2nd and 3rd grade), they need to be learning in an environment that is more focused on collaboration, cooperation, and communication. This will effectively prepare them for middle and high school, as well as the workplace and society.
One other 21st century skill that I think we can work on with the children is competition. In elementary school we can teach them to compete against themselves rather than their young peers. We can encourage them to improve on previous attempts, and beat prior scores. Maybe when taught to work to their fullest potential, they will be able to out-pace their competitors later in the job market.
Great post!
You did a really good job summing up my feelings on this site in your first couple sentences. I thought that there were a number of excellent resources available on this site but it was difficult to navigate and it took me some time to uncover all of the different resources the site offered. I also really liked the SOS for informational literacy, there was a really wide range of lessons so that teachers of any level or subject area could find something that related to their content. I was also surprised by the list of participating states, you have to think that this program has tried to include as many states as possible and yet there are still only a small handful participating. Why is that? Does that say something about how effective this program has been so far? Great post, love your blog!
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