Evaluating 21st Century Skills

In evaluating the Partnership in 21st Century Skills website, I was impressed at the profound information that the site offered. The information was well organized and articles were available with links and videos on various subjects. One link that caught my attention was a story that featured discipline strategies being used in the Jefferson County School District. This district modeled examples of how their discipline strategies improved students' choices in their behavior and raised academic success. One strategy entitled, "the Tab strategy", encourages students to take responsibility of their actions immediately. This strategy requires the student to take a break in or out of the classroom so that the instructor can address a negative behavior that the student displayed during instruction. The goal of the Tab strategy is to stop the progression of negative behavior on the onset. Other strategies were introduced in this video, as well, and I was thoroughly impressed overall.

I was surprised that my home state of Michigan was not listed under the State Initiatives. Partnership for 21st Century Skills Leadership states design new standards, assessments, and professional development programs to better prepare our students with the skills that they will need to become successful in the future. These leadership states must demonstrate the ability to develop ongoing revisions on their state standards and assessments to meet the goals of the 21st century skills that students will need. The state of Michigan has been known to have high expectations for teachers and rigorous requirements for teacher certification. I would expect that they would welcome the opportunity to be a leader in such a program as 21st Century Skills.

The implications of this website for students and educators are high in the fact that both will be held accountable for success in the schools of today. As we continue to compete in a global economy, our government is demanding that tomorrow's workers be highly qualified and prepare to led our nation forward. The education system has to equip our students with the ability to be creative critical thinkers who are able to collaborate to be successful. Enable for this to be implemented, educators will be required to constantly train in new ideas and progressing technology through professional development. Students will be held more accountable for their academic achievement, as higher expectations will govern new benchmark standards.

Idea for Classroom Blogging

Blogging in the classroom is a great way for students to connect ideas and for concepts to be reinforced. I would set up a classroom blog, and students would be required to check the blog every day. Each day a journal question would be posted for the students to respond with an answer. The question or assignment will be centered around a concept from the previous day's instruction. For example, if I assigned a new spelling list on Monday, Tuesday's blog assignment would be to write each word in an original sentence using the word in the correct context. For reading, students will be given a comprehension question that was discussed in class and be required to select a strategy to use to write a paragraph to answer. Using the blog for writing assignments will really be interesting. In writing, my students are expected to use the five step writing process to complete a paper. For the pre-writing step, the students will blog their ideas for a topic and organize some of their material chosen. This will allow all the students to blog ideas about topics that they are considering and gather information about their topic of choice from other classmates, as well.

New to Blogging

Welcome to my blog! I am an elementary teacher in Jackson, Michigan. I am really new at this technology and I am looking forward to learning all that I can about blogging in my technology course.