Partnership for the 21st Century Skills: A Review

When I sit down to create a list of skills my students need I tend to begin with very basic reading skills. Part of this comes from the community of students that I work with-- remedial reading high school kids. They tend to lack the very basic strategies that most capable readers use without another thought. Therefore, my list includes basic comprehension skills, summarizing, paraphrasing, evaluation, analysis skills-- and I tend to use technology to help my students access these skills.

When presented with the "Partnership for the 21st Century Skills" website my first thought was a bit of disbelief: the website is (proudly) endorsed by a series of technology companies. The pages look great, colorful and enticing. The companies make a strong plea for teaching our students skills that are appliable in today's work force. Over all, however, I was not impressed. First, this site will be completely out of date for our students upon their arrival in the work world. Second, unless these companies will be dishing out the technology and software (and forcing our districts to change their stance on use of filters), these ideas are great, but impractical. Beyond that, we are educators are called to teach content first... and YES, I believe in implimenting as much technology as possible into my classroom (kids love it, and kids that buy into something tend to learn something)... but first and foremost, I have to teach my students to read.

You want change in the workforce, Companies who support this "Partnership"? Shell out some cash to our districts.

Week 2: Whoooo-hoo!

First, I would like to say that I made a tactical error with picking the pink background. That will be remedied ASAP.

I would love to see blogging in my senior English lit class. The students are mostly boys, remedial readers who have had little sucess in school before this class. This class is part of our Reading Team's "Response to Intervention" (RTI), where students were placed in classes according to their reading levels. I would like to create a blog-- more like a Ning-- where students can reply to the class blog posts and response to each other, without the really annoying and long response strings. My kids have very little patience for anything academic, so the posting would have to be quick and dirty, if you will. Something that the kids could learn fast and impliment just as quickly. I would like to use this for their Senior Capstone projects (these are their "Capstone" experiences-- a <15 hour project, 5-8 page research paper, and presentation to the community). I would like to allow my students to gripe about the project in a place where their headaches can be worked through. Beyond that, I'd like the students to network with one another. I think the value of that boils down to them needing to remember that there are more than just them in this project. Also, they like the social aspect of the web and are more willing to "buy in" to such a project.