Partnership for 21st Century Skills

This site has a lot of support to offer educators, which is very nice to know. I am impressed with this site. I am most impressed with the mission statement which sums up perfectly what the organization is all about. The website’s mission statement says that it serves “as a catalyst to position 21st century skills at the center of US K-12 education by building collaborative partnerships among education, business, community and government leaders” (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2004).

I was surprised by a few things when I perused through the website. What surprised me about this organization is that it is the leading organization in incorporating the 21st century skills with the US K-12 education. I had not heard of it before reading this week’s resources, and I am surprised to see how many other areas of work are involved with this organization. It is not just teachers; there are many others such as businesses and policy makers who are together with educators, trying to make this incorporation of 21st century skills and education come together!

What I did notice that was not positive about the site, is that not all the US states are following this organization’s mission. Only a handful of the states are in the drop down menu. My state, Washington, is not on their. That makes sense now why I have not heard of this organization before. It has been going on since 2004 according to the organization’s website, so for five years what have the other states been doing? Is this organization trying hard enough to get the nation on board? I wonder about this, and whether there will be more states following in the future.

The implications for myself as an educator are to become knowledgeable about these 21st century skills, and teach them daily in the classroom. Strive to help develop these skills in each student so they can thrive in the workplace. Teachers need to give their students the tools they will need for the future (which will develop in them the 21st century skills). Another implication is to try to get my state on board with the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

The implications for my students are to embrace technology and use it to enhance learning. Students need to take the tools that teachers give them to help develop these skills and use them to help prepare themselves for the world after high school.

References:

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

Using blogging as a tool to enhance learning

Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking hard about how I can use blogs in my classroom to help enhance student learning and increase student motivation. I teach high school Spanish, levels I/II and III/IV. One idea I have come up with is to use a blog to help showcase their work and to help me as a teacher see at what level students are with their writing and grammar skills. I will use a blog for students to reflect on questions I give them in Spanish, and each question will deal with new grammar concepts previously learned in the classroom. It will give students time to reflect on how they will write their answers correctly and to express themselves in Spanish. One idea I've thought about is to have students practice the past tense in Spanish with my blog. I could ask them questions using the preterite tense (a past tense in Spanish) and students would have to identify that the question I was asking was in the preterite tense and they would respond in the same tense to the question(s). I could have a new question every week, or do one blog assignment per unit. Students could also incorporate their new vocabulary into the response as well. For example, students will be learning food vocabulary shortly in second year Spanish and they will also learn the preterite tense. I could ask a variety of questions which would be in Spanish such as:
I:
1. What did you eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner yesterday?
2. Was the food good or bad?
3. Who prepared your meals?
II:
1. What is a restaurant you ate at recently?
2. What did you order?
3. Did you like it?
4. How much did it cost?
5. Who were you with?

This is just a very quick example of some questions I could ask with the current unit being studied. Its sole purpose would be for students to express themselves in a different way using the target language, and to practice being accurate with new grammar and vocabulary. It would be useful for me as a teacher to see how well students write and understand the simple past tense and how their writing is improving with each blog post. It would also give students practice with using accents and symbols with a computer, since the Spanish language has many symbols that need to be added when typing. I could check for how accurate they are with this as well.

As I am writing this blog, I am coming up with other ideas as I go. I would also perhaps assign each student to comment on at least one student's response with another question. The question would have to include the past tense as well, and be used as accurately as possible. This would make for some good interaction outside of the classroom in the Spanish language!!

Blogging seems like a great tool for the classroom, especially when I think of using it with Spanish. Students would be practicing the language and be interested at the same time. It seems like it would not be too troublesome to grade either. Does anyone have any thoughts or comments on my ideas? Or how about the grading that goes along with blogging? Do you find it easy to grade students' participation?

My last question is should I be grading more on participation rather than grammar/accuracy? I'm not too sure what the grading part would look like yet. Any ideas there?