The Partnership For 21st Century Skills

I am quite excited to have been introduced to this excellent new resource. I really enjoyed exploring the website for The Partnership for 21st Century Skills and find much of the information on this site helpful and insightful to educators of 21st century students. I especially liked how well stated their mission statement was and found that some key words stood out to me. "Every child in America needs 21st century knowledge and skills to succeed as effective citizens, workers and leaders in the 21st century." The word leaders is a powerful word that I as as an educator need to take seriously. This website is a blessing to teachers who are dedicated to creating the leaders of tomorrow. It is powerful and encouraging that we do not have to stand alone in this. We have the power to seek help and work together with our communities and surrounding businesses. In addition, this site addresses the problem that "there is a profound gap between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need in typical 21st century communities and workplaces". This is so apparent in this time in society but we are now on the verge of vast improvements and resources. I look optimistically into the future of education and hope that educators, with the endless resources we now have, can provide all students with the highest quality education for the 21st century.

This website is incredibly user friendly and full of vital resources for educators to utilize in their own classrooms. I will definitely be visiting this website again and will spend some more time exploring the possibilities!

Kindergarten and Blogging...?

I am quite new to blogging in general, especially in the classroom, but am quickly becoming a fan of this incredible tool. I teach kindergarten and and have been asking myself the question..."How do I incorporate the use of blogging in my classroom when my students are so young?" I have come to my own obvious conclusions considering the age of my students and the limitations I have when implementing some technologies in my daily classroom. Blogging is not a practical and or appropriate form of technology that I feel I should be using in my classroom and my students simply do not have the capacities for responding to classroom blogs yet.

With that being said...I am excited to incorporate blogging into the variety of ways I communicate with the parents and families of my students.  I can now create a "Room 2" blog where I can make a post each day or every few days about what we are doing in class, important things for parents to know and  any other information I would like to share with parents. This would be like a daily newsletter except that parents can now respond to my blog and give me their immediate feedback and or ideas. This will open up the lines of communication between myself and the parents, as well as the communication from parent to parent. They can all share parenting tips and other relevant information among each other while establishing friendships and creating a sense of family and community.

I am I like how our classroom blog will establish a two way road of communication rather than a one way road coming just from the teacher. I also think that educating parents on these technologies and making them easy and available will help them stay in touch with the resources and technologies that are out there that their children will have access to. If parents are able to use these resources or at least are familiar with them they may be more likely to monitor what their students are using. 

I am extremely excited to get this going and to see how effective this tool can be!