21st Century Skills

In this week’s application assignment, the partnership for 21st century skills, which may be found at (www.21stcenturyskills.org), provides advocacy and guidance to those involved in the education field to supplement their instruction with the skills and tasks deemed essential for success in the current and future economy. In my classroom, I strive to utilize these tasks on a weekly if not daily basis. It is rather surprising and helpful to know that the website references its common goals of these tasks to some of the states’ initiatives in education. What I have to disagree with is only that my own home state (Illinois) unfortunately does not buy into the Route 21 system. Thus it may be more difficult for me unfortunately to tailor my instruction to the goals of a 21st century education along with my own state’s educational standards. If I was to follow one plan more rigorously than the other in my curriculum, I might incorrectly skew the directives of my instruction. Nevertheless, the implications of this site into the educational arena allows for all those involved, to have some sort of guideline map and resource hub, to gather ideas utilizing 21st century leaning tasks and effectively present them to their students.

Blogs in the Classroom

Hello all! Stephen Hogan here and I'm a fourth year physics teacher at John Hersey High School located in Arlington Heights, IL.

Speaking about the use of blogs in the classroom setting, I currently utilize a blog already with my physics students. Please take a look at it during your leisure and it may be found at one of the top tabs on my following course website:

http://web.me.com/sphogan

As you can observe while viewing the blog I am currently only using it for the very basics of its intention as a running diary of all the daily activities in my two physics courses. My students rely on it whenever they are absent for the day to catch up on what was covered for the day, or if they happened to forget to write down the homework assignment, the students may find the posted assignments there if necessary. For that purpose the site is quite useful as my students love an opportunity to connect with the course tasks whenever they happen to be away.

Yet, I currently do not allow my students to participate in a discussion of the events or post to the blog. I attempted to do this with my students during the blog's infancy, but it was common during that time span that high schoolers being the teenagers that they are, loved to post not so appropriate items to the blog. This required a large amount of additional time by myself, monitoring the discussion thread and omitting inappropriate items related to the course material. I might try this once more with the blog on my course website in the future, perhaps when the technology develops where the blog could filter out its own inappropriate content.

A pretty cool site for some pretty cool demos!

http://groups.physics.umn.edu/demo