21st Century Skills... Ready or not?

Being a teacher in the 21^st Century is an amazing challenge for educators.  We face the daunting task of helping our students reach some very audacious goals, which incorporate success academically and also socially.  As a teacher, it is my task to discover how to capture the minds of my 27 little darlings and teach them not just the core academic subjects, but also the skills to survive as a worker in the world they are getting ready to enter—the social skills, thinking skills, and life skills they need to be successful come in large part from the experiences they have and challenges they are asked to meet in the school setting.

I get little shivers every time I think about the huge impact that we as teachers can and should be having on our students—am I doing everything I can be to make sure that my students learn what they need to from me?  With this question haunting me a little more each day, I was relieved to discover this website yesterday called “Partnership for 21^st Century Skills”.  This website is for an organization by the same name which strives to make lawmakers and other policy makers more aware of the necessary changes we need to make for our students to be ready for the 21^st Century’s demands.  It also strives to give educators the resources they need to help make this happen.

I have been trying to wrap my head around the question “Exactly what do my students need to know and be able to do in the 21^st Century?” for a couple of years now, and this website offered some very succinct answers: Students need instruction in the “3Rs and 4Cs”.  The “3Rs” are the traditional core subjects (the good ole readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic, along with several other core subjects) that students need to be instructed in and have a working knowledge of (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2013) .  The “4Cs” were my favorite part of the website—these are the skills that students need to have instilled in them: Collaboration, Communication, Critical Thinking Skills, and Creativity.  The 4Cs helped me give a name to all the skills that I have been thinking all along that my students need—now I know what to call it, the challenge is still how?

I’m still trying to process through how I will be able to teach the core academic subjects and these critical skills—where does the time for this come?  What I keep landing on is the idea that I need to modify, tweak, or invent projects that allow my students to practice these skills through the curriculum and core subjects.  I keep thinking about how students could be working on Creativity and Collaboration as they are trying to solve a difficult math problem that I’ve asked them to explain with images; or maybe my students could use a wiki to share their thoughts about a book we’ve been reading to help practice their Communication and Critical Thinking skills.  What have you been adding or changing in your curriculums to help your students develop these skills—I’d love to hear your ideas!

This website left me feeling challenged, overwhelmed, and excited about the direction we’re taking our students—the only thing I wish I could have found somewhere on the website where it mentioned the kind of technology competencies that students should have by a certain age.  I work with 5^th graders, and I’m never sure what kind of technology skills I can expect of them or how to train them to have these skills, and I would love some guidance from such a great organization as Partnership for 21^st Century Skills.

Resource:

Partnership for 21st Century Skills. (2013). Retrieved from http://www.p21.org/

Blogging is for kids too-- right? (My Brave New Step)

One of the hallmarks of a 21^st Century education is the movement away from teacher-centered, memorization-required schooling, towards a creative, collaborative, student-centered classroom.  This can be a daunting task for many teachers, as many of us were not raised in this type of environment.  One of the tools that can help teachers accomplish this is a student or classroom blog. There are a variety of blogging platforms for teachers to use for free, and many school districts also provide a web platform that students and teachers can use. 

In many blogging platforms, there is a capability for students to post work and interact with each other.  Because I work with elementary age students, my school district does not allow us to have blog posts go public, but the web platform that my school district provides allows us to provide students with a password to create a private class site so that only students and parents can see it.  While this limits the audience for my students, it gives many of my students the ability to see each other’s posts, ideas, and projects.  There is also the capability for students to comment on each other’s posts and for the teacher to monitor and control what is posted.

I haven’t yet used very many of the blogging capabilities available to me, but I am thinking for next year about starting to have students comment about a text we have read together in class, and work on their ability to reference the text in their original postings and in their replies to each other.  This is something that will help us align our writing curriculum to the Common Core, which requires students to be able to reference the text in their thinking and writing.

I’ve always been nervous to start blogging with my class, because I haven’t been sure if I can trust my fifth graders to put appropriate, thoughtful comments.  But, next year I’m planning to take the plunge, along with some careful teaching about what thoughtful comments would look like. Wish me luck as I prepare to take this brave new step!

The Amazing Rate of Technology Change-- Hold on Tight!

Technology is changing at an astonishing rate, both in the technology available, and in the accessibility that students and schools have to technology.  This has produced an environment in which teachers are somewhat lost about how to incorporate these motivating, engaging, and relevant technologies into their current pedagogies and practices.  I recently participated in a year-long professional development program through my school district that provided additional classroom technology and professional development to learn how to use it effectively.  I feel as though my experiences in this program opened my eyes to the different ways that technology can and should be used to enhance student learning.

One of the focuses of this professional development experience was creating experiences we referred to as “Tier 3” experiences, following the model of Educational Technology Standards put out by Washington State Office of the Superintendent (OSPI, 2013).  In Tier 3, the goal is to have technology be used by students to create and collaborate.  We were encouraged to move beyond having students use computers for simple word-processing, and instead have students do collaborative projects using GoogleDrive or some other collaborative Web-based application. 

These technology advances, such as iPads, GoogleDrive, blogs, and more, have created an array of tools that allow for a different kind of learning than was ever possible before.  I had my students do a group project using GooglePresentation, which I had originally planned to do as an entirely in-class activity (an attempt to limit homework for students), but was very pleased to discover that my students were eager and anxious to work on the project at home and collaborate with each other.  I also have the ability to collaborate with my coworkers in a way that was not possible before through websites, Evernote, and more.  The current and evolving technologies have allowed student learning and teacher collaboration to go places never before imagined.

Resources:

Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. (2013).Tiers of technology integration into the classroom indicators. Retrieved from http://www.k12.wa.us/EdTech/TechLiteracy/TechIntTiers.aspx