Partnership for 21st Century Skills

When first looking around at the Partnership for 21st Century Skills I thought to myself what is this? I had a tough time finding things and understanding what the website was about. After awhile, I thought what a great website to have for our future in education and our 21st century students. This organization advocates readiness in regards to innovation for every student. It is a great way for both teachers and students to enhance education by keeping up with the three R's and four C's (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation). When exploring the organization website I looked through all the news and notes the website had about announcements and the productivity that was going on to keep this organization running at a top notch level.

Teachers need training in instructional technology and 21st century skills so they can learn how to embed these skills into their classroom and also have a support system (Miners & Pascopella, 2007). One thing I found interesting when going to the state initiatives tab is how the certain state department of education really backed this organization and had a complete list of initiatives mapped out to best educate their students and have them ready to enter our 21st century and have all the essential skills needed to be productive in society. It was also good to see that certain states had 21st century standards side by side with state standards. I appreciated that they were still concerned with their content standards and were aligning them to see where they fit with the 21st century standards.

Other information I found beneficial from the site was under the tools tab and seeing that they offer Professional Development. I feel this is a great thing to offer the teachers so that we can be informed and be able to provide the accurate education of these tremendous resources. I believe this is a great tool that our government, districts, and organizations are putting together to offer the knowledge and tools to combine with our own curriculum to all and all better prepare our children for the society they soon will enter in the 21st century.

References:

 

Miners, Z., & Pascopella, A. (2007). The new literacies. District Administration, 43(10), 26–34

Blog In My Classroom

To develop a blog for my Physical Education class I will use this as a feedback and suggestion box. It would be a great way to interact with students on a daily basis to get feedback to see how well they are enjoying whatever they are learning in my class and also get suggestions on units and games they would like to see in the future. It would also be a good way to let them share games with me. I always have students come up to me in class and say can we try this game or that game. With having a blog it would be a great way to get all the ideas from all your students and not take away any additional class time.

Physical Education and Sport

This is my first time as a blogger. I am setting up this blog for Physical Education teachers as well as teachers in other content areas to communicate with one another about ideas within their content area as well as regards to technology ideas in each specific content area. In Physical Education it is difficult to find time to incorporate a lot of different types of technology that is found out of the classroom. We as Physical Education teachers already lack sufficient amount of time to give students the time to be active and practice living healthy lifetstyles. Some students only see physical activity in their Physical Education classes and are not active at all once they get home and get out of school.

A good way to incorporate blogs with students if you have adequate time in your Phyiscal Education class is to allow time for students to blog on your blog site. Adopters of Weblogs in the classroom have already created a wide variety of ways to use them, and they have shown that blogs can enhance and deepen learning. (Richardson, 2010) This would let students give their opinions on the units you were doing and also give suggestions on future units. This allows student feedback and a great way to get students involved in your program.  

References:

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.