The Partnership for 21^st Century Skills Web site is a great way to gather ideas to incorporate into a classroom. The mission of the leadership organization is to “Serve as a catalyst to position 21^st century skills at the center of US K-12 education by building collaborative partnerships among education, business, community and government leaders” (2004). After taking some time to explore the Web site, I have realized the members of this group have the best interests of the kids and their futures in mind. The members of this organization were fairly well known for me and I enjoyed looking through all the educational leaders, businesses, policymakers, and parents involved in the group.

There were a variety of different types of resources available on this site and I enjoyed scanning through the pages. The one that interested me the most was the “Video 21” page. This page has several videos dealing with 21^st century skills needed for our children. The first video I viewed dealt with explaining what this organization was about. I enjoyed watching this video because it helped me to see what the framework of this organization was all about. It is to help move students to be better critical thinkers, innovators and problem solvers through the use of technology. They also believe in having students becoming great communicators, which will make them be better global citizens. Our students need to have an idea of the 21^st century skills to help them be prepared for the world around them. The members of the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills created this video and their top priority is to come together, generate ideas and address issues.

The second video I became interested in was titled “Coin Toss Experiment.” I was intrigued with the title because the unit we are currently teaching, in math, deals with data analysis and probability. In this video, the elementary age students were conducting an experiment with a one thousand-coin toss to see the probability of heads vs. tails. In the lesson, the teacher had the students first make predictions. At this time, if I could have changed the lesson, I would have had the students pair-share with a tablemate so all the students were held accountable for a prediction. This would also have allowed students to have time to collaborate with a peer and hear another way of thinking. Then, the students began the experiment. In order to find the final data, the students used calculators to find the final count. After the data was totaled, the teacher created a bar graph using an Internet graph-making program. I felt this was a valuable lesson for the students and creating a bar graph using this type of technology is great for the students to see.

This page would be a great resource for teachers to help improve their classrooms toward a 21^st Century learning environment. The implications for my students and for me as a contemporary educator will be to work on incorporating these easy Internet websites to enable my students to see the tools available for them in the future. If they watch me, or create a graph themselves, on the computer, they will be able to use this tool in the future.

Resources:

The Partnership for 21^st Century Skills. 2004. http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/.

Blogging in the Classroom

I am new at blogging, but I am seeing great potential for this type of technology. A way I might be able to use blogging in my classroom is something that my students brought up to me today. At my school, we currently have a grant for all students to receive a snack each day. These snacks include many different types of fruits and vegetables from all over the country. One way I could use blogging in my classroom would be to have a way to visit with students from other countries about how these types of food are grown. My students are very inspired by learning from one another and I feel a blogging situation could improve their knowledge about this concept. I can only imagine how excited they would be to receive a message from someone in another state, as well as a different country.

There are several other ways blogging could be used in my classroom which could be by just interacting with other students from around our state. At my school we truly believe in the looping process, so I taught 4th grade last year and now I am teaching the same students in 5th grade. This is my first time being involved with looping and have seen many benefits to this process. Blogging is a good tool for the instructional context because my students would not only be able to learn from their own peers, they would also learn from others around the country.

Hi my name is Wendi Elsen. I graduated from the University of Wyoming and moved to Casper, Wyoming. I currently teach 5th grade and truly enjoy each day! I am very excited to start using technology in my classroom and further my students abilities with technology.