Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Partnering with 21st Century Skills

At first, I really liked what I saw. The site was bright, which gave me the impression that it was full of useful information and resources. Before reading anything, I wanted to just scroll through the site and see what jumped out at me. Unfortunately, not too much caught my eye. At first, I could not understand the point of the site. I did notice I could sign up for a newsletter, but is that it? I started reading a few of the posts and clicking on their links. A few of the articles I saw were pretty interesting, but nothing I could not find posted on a union board in a teacher's lounge.

Over all, I did not disagree with anything on the site. Whether viewers have different political views or opinions is one thing, but the articles were current and generally informative. They basically stated that technology is moving too fast for education to keep up. I think a lot of us already knew this. There was, however, some good links to some interesting blogs. I thought that was a nice touch for any educators trying to keep in the fast lane known as technology.

I did like what I read in the overview and their ideas about supporting classrooms with the new 21st century technology. Everything was there, like standards, professional development, and curriculum. You just needed to do some "clicking" around all the announcements to find it.

Now how does this affect my students? Well a lot of this can be focused on demographics. Not only the type of neighborhood that my students live in but their age group. I teach in an inner city elementary school where there is not a lot of money for technology in the first place. And according to the chancellor, high school has seniority to any tech distributions, followed by middle school and then elementary school. The further my students move, the more exposure the should see... I hope...

1 comment:

  1. It is sad that it seems to be that away. However, I think we should start exposing children to technology as soon as they start school. My daughter is in K and she has a netbook. I realize that all parents are not able to purchase netbooks for the children and give them the exposure I give my children. However, as a fomer Elm. school teacher and current middle school teacher children love computers regardless the age. If you use just a little bit of tech. in your teaching you can grab their attention and they think you are the coolest teacher or earth.

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