Digital Natives or Immigrants? Are we dulling our students?

Digital immigrants grew up in a one step at a time process learning enviornment. Digital natives, today's students, grow up surrounded my media stimulus and technology. Today's students are surrounded by multitasking, listening to an iPod, wathcing TV, playing video games, instant messaging, texting, talking and researching...all at the same time! They show up at school and we expect them to focus when asked to put it all away, get out a paper and pencil. They become disingaged and disinterested. We need to stimulate our students while making information memorable and lasting.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills

http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/

The partnership for 21st century skills is a website that advocates infusing 21st century skills into education. The organization brings together the buisiness world, educational leaders and policy makers all in the name of creating valuble standards to bring to light the need for these higher level skills and incorporation of technology in today's curriculum.

The site is very will organized with tons of valuable information. The highlights listed in the center show the accolades the site has earned as well as news on events and curriculum matters that are new to the table. There are some good links in the tools and resources section that would be great for an interactive staff development. I found information on the state in which I teach, West Virginia. We are one of a few states that have a state implimented plan for initiating 21st century skills to prepare our students for the work world that will await them. It seems like good plans but they would be great plans if they were implimented to thier fullest. With test scores at the focus of every district 21st century skills can fall through the cracks. I would love to say that our state is a leader in 21st century skills but as always there is so much more that could be done. I think that the P21 site is a great resource for teachers it provides a lot of information that may bring teachers around to jump on the 21st century band wagon.

Blogging for curriculum sake!

I teach art in a K-5th grade setting. I have utililzed blogging in various ways to enhance my curriculum. I started with a free website called classchatter.com, if you've never tried it our I highly suggest it. It is very easy and safe for students. I have used this as well as a blogspot for several purposes. It is a communal place where students can work individually and collaborativly and as fast or as slow as needed. The communal place allows me to add links, videos, promts, reading material, auditory stories or anything imaginable. Most recently a group of third graders were learning about artist quotes; what is a quote, how do you correctly write a quote, and what is the significance of an artist statement were thier objectives that were clearly posted at the front end of the blog. Students researched famous quotes and posted them. Then they read eachothers and commented on at least 5. Students them created a set of thier own quotes and helped grammer correct errors in small virtual groups. All the while I could watch all of the interactions and progress through the lesson. I truley feel that blogging offers a strategy that can provide diverse learning oppourtunites to my students.

RSS Feed

The feed icon was way harder to add than I had anticipated. Jeff M from group two gave a good site for directions.

http://www.asktheblogger.com/how-do-i-put-a-rss-feed-on-my-blogger-blog/

The confusing part is editing the actual HTML in the layout...