While looking around the website http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/ I was impressed with the number of major companies and brands involved in this endeavour. The website was well laid out and easy to navigate. While reading the mission statement, I was shocked to see some of the points listed there such as Civic Literacy, Thinking and Problem Solving, and Interpersonal and self-direction skills are taught in schools today and was offended that they implied we don;t do these. The other three points seemed reasonable as something we could work on to further our students understanding to prepare them for the 21st century workplace.

I liked that they offered training centers online to help with these new 21st century skills, however non were currently available where I live in Michigan. They seemed to be a fairly new initiative that is trying to grow and define themselves so we will have to wait and see what can really come form all of this.

The resources online offered good description of skills needed but I found it hard to locate any information showing teachers exactly how to incorporate these new skills into our classroom so was disappointed. Over all It looks like allot of talk about things teachers need to prepare students for which sound good on paper, but they offer nothing to teachers to help so they also do not really have the answer of how to change schools to meet these new standards?

I know the implications for my students are real, they ned to be prepared to enter this tech savy work force with a strong understaning of how to interact in society especially in the work place so these skills neesd to be taught. But again my questions on how to do this better were not answered by this site but maybe I missed something?

One thing I would like to use my Blog for is a place to connect my students and parents with what is going on in my classroom. I would like to post documents, homework, links to cool sites for history and government, and a class schedule. I would also like a place for my students to interact with one another on current events that I would post links to on my Blog that pertain to the lessons we are talking about. Eventually, I would like to use my Blog as a jumping off point for a class group project on Interest Groups. Right now I currently have my students do my Interest Group project in which the end result is a nice portfolio but I would like to adapt that so they would each create their own Blog linked through mine using RSS feeds. This would allow them to become more creative and hopefully make it more interesting to them knowing many other people can check it out not just myself or others in that class. This project would be done in my 11th grade Government class and would allow the kids to research their interest and connect to other interest groups aggregator site like bloglines. It would also allow them to make graphics, post pictures, music, and video if they like.

My first Blogging Experience

I just created my Blog and am getting a feel for it all so give me some time to make it better.