21st Century Learning

For our class this week, we were asked to take a look at the site Partnership for 21^st Century Skills. You can reach it through this link: http://www.p21.org/ 

This assignment is part of our current Walden University course, where we are learning to integrate technology in our classrooms.

At first, when I looked at the site, it felt very much like an advertisement to buy their materials. Then I realised that many of the resources are free if you just want to download them, and I began to get a little more excited. As a recent focus in our education system in Bermuda, we have been looking at developing common core standards. While many of our assessments are British, we also have a large number of students taking tests like the SAT, and heading off to the United States and Canada for further education. For me, the design of the subject area maps seemed very helpful with its links to common core standards. I also really liked the inclusion of Interdisciplinary Themes (Global awareness, Financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy, Civic literacy, Health literacy, and Environmental literacy) into core subjects.

I also really enjoyed the little movie made by Peter Reynolds (author of one of my favourite read-alouds, “Ish”) called “Above and Beyond”, which really underlined the idea that creativity and cooperation are key 21^st century skills. I am actually planning to share it with my class this week as I think it will help them understand the value of these skill sets.

The emphasis on critical thinking skills seems key to this program, and I feel it is a most important skill that we just do not seem to be getting across to the students well. I also thought that there was a clear emphasis on including technologies, although there did not seem to be a thrust towards 2.0-type literacies specifically.

We were asked to comment on anything we disagreed with in the site, and I am not sure I specifically disagree with anything. I certainly agree that students need to master “multi-dimensional abilities” in order to be successful in this century. I suppose that the ways in which we as educators carry out the task of preparing our students to meet the 21^st century challenge are maybe a little less cut and dried than spelled out in this website, and perhaps the implementation of yet another program might not be the best way to encourage creativity in teachers. On the other hand, if you look at the kinds of tasks they were suggesting in the subject area maps, they do seem to allow for creativity and flexibility in implementation. The worry I would have is that our boards and other supervisory bodies might expect the process laid out here to be followed to the letter, which would seem to go against their idea of multi-literacies.

This is an interesting site, worth a visit, although their blog seems very technical, more of a professor’s blog than one I would subscribe to. If you visit, be sure to check out their subject maps! Here’s the Science one:

http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/21stcskillsmap_science.pdf

 

I set my parents homework this week- I used a hyperlink in an email inviting them to find out more about RSS. At least one has done it already and said she was going to try setting up an RSS feed. Now I need to keep plugging away at the blog idea for my classroom...

Back to School night went well! I have some tech-savvy parents who are very excited about my blogging plans.

Back to school night tonight! Busy busy. I hope to show "my" parents how an RSS feed works and suggest they add the school site - have not managed to do the blog part of the site but hopefully that will be set up soon.

Today I made contact with one of the "tech guys" and he seems almost as excited as me about the concept of blogging for my class. My school has a website and there is a blog site on it already - which as far as I can see has never been used, except for my recent post to see what it would do. However Anthony says he can set up a link on the class tab for our own class blog.

This sounds wonderful except I want to be able to moderate the site. Hopefully he will get back to me soon about it.

Has anyone ever set up a blog like this before, and how important is it to be the moderator? I see lots of my classmates have sites where they did not set themselves up as moderators - not as important I think if you are working with adults?

Utilizing Blogs in the Classroom

For part of a course I am doing, I have been asked to post an idea of how I might use a blog in my Grade Five classroom. I should note that I am a general classroom teacher with a specialty in Science, and that I also teach Information Technology to my own class.

After I have spent some time teaching the students how to respond appropriately on a blog, including reading, modelling, safety and practice as suggested by Richardson (2010, p.45-47), I would like to start using blogs for students to participate in Book Clubs. Book Clubs are part of the overall Reading Workshop espoused by the Literacy Collaborative - you can find out more about how to manage and set up "regular" book clubs from a variety of authors including Gay Su Pinell,  Isoke Titalyo Nia and Irene Fountas - and they are expecially great for getting Grade 4s and 5s talking about books. This of course will hopefully help them love books and be interested in what other people think of the books they have read.

This very exciting instructional strategy would be enhanced by using a blog because the participating students would be able to interact about the the book they are reading as and when they have something to say, rather than waiting for the next meeting to discuss their thoughts. In addition, it is a way that I can easily give students credit for their ideas and of course take part in the discussion, which is not always possible in the classroom.  I plan on making our first efforts at blogging password-protected if possible, and I welcome any ideas about how to set that up effectively. If it works as well as I hope, then I would love to invite a larger audience to participate, maybe including the author of the book as described on several blogs. I would also like to include both parents and perhaps some community figures, but I want a trial run without an audience first.

This forum for discussion and collaboration expands the boundaries of the classroom, as November (2008) explains in Web Literacy for Educators. In addition, it utilises techonology in a way that makes sense to students in the Informational Age - or, dare I say, the Communication Age (Thornburg in Laureate Education, 2010). Showcasing their thinking in this way sets the bar higher for individual performance and expression, allowing students themselves to take the reins of the discussion.

I obtained a lot of ideas for blogs from reading the following blogs posted by teachers.
A great one to read is

http://primarytech.global2.vic.edu.au/2012/07/20/making-educational-blogging-work-for-you/comment-page-1/#comment-3278 by Kathleen Morris, who also is great at responding to posts. I also enjoyed http://itc.blogs.com/thewriteweblog/page/5/ by Anne Davis, but this site although useful seems to be inactive at present. I chose both of these blogs beacuse the students involved are roughly the same age as my students.

 

I hope that I will be able to start the "getting ready" process next week, and once again I welcome suggestions and advice about how to manage the process of blogging for the classroo,

Resources:

 

Knobel, M., & Wilber, D. (2009). Let's talk 2.0. Educational Leadership, 66(6), pp. 20-24.

Laureate Education, Inc. (2010). Designing curriculum, instruction and assessment. Baltimore, MD.

November, A. (2008). Web literacy for educators. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Back to the classroom at last this morning! I hope that the children are just as excited as I am - and that the server is back up. :)

Here are some pictures of Bermuda under tropical storm force winds (well, gusts) as seen from my house. Our last big storm was Hurricane Fabian and the dock you can see in the last picture was completely submerged by the swells rolling in from the ocean.

Happily we did not lose power and are unlikely to now, and school will reopen tomorrow for teachers, making our actual first day back with our students 2 days late. At least I learned how to insert a link and a picture today!

Today we are suffering the effects of TS/Hurricane Leslie which is brushing past us to the East. The power is still fine, but the internet is a bit hit or miss at the moment. There are bands of very heavy rain and although my house is protected from the worst of the wind at present it is forecast to blow out of the north east later today - and we are exposed from that direction.

I thought today I would learn how to include a link in my post, and that weather.bm is a good one incase anyone wants to look at the radar and satellite images for the storm. Later today I will practice including pictures!

Official Bermuda Weather site

Well, that was easy! I hope it works!

I know the server is down at school or I would be using my virtual desktop to play some more with my section of the school website, and to see how the blog that is attached works. So I suppose I will be doing the rest of this upcoming week's readings and perhaps some baking. Power permitting! And, of course, snuggles with my family and most importantly the cats.

I understand that the best way to start blogging is to go ahead and jump right in. I am looking forward to communicating with others, especially other teachers who use blogs to stay in contact with parents and to enhance the learning experience of their students.

If you have any tips, please let me know!