The Partnership for 21st Century Skills

In reviewing the Partnership for 21st Century Skills website, I found the site to be overall fairly useful.  The site discusses skills necessary for students to be successful in their future careers that schools need to improve upon.  Skills such as working cooperatively together, using critical thinking skills, and utilizing multiple forms of communication are described as skills that need to have more of a focus in school.  Perhaps it is because I went to college in the past seven years or that it depends on the type of college I went to, but my feeling is that these areas have always been concentrated on within my classroom.  Cooperative learning is something my students always do.  Project-based learning has always been an integral part of my curriculum because I feel students learn best when they are active, engaged, and have a stake in their own learning.  My questioning tactics always lean more towards the higher end of Bloom’s Taxonomy.  As I have said, maybe it is due to my background, but my feeling is that most educators strive for similar objectives in their classrooms.  What are your thoughts on this? 

One tremendous benefit in reviewing the site was the amount of resources available.  There was a section under their resources that described what various states were doing to meet the 21^st century skills.  I discovered, for example, that my state has a variety of programs that educators can sign up for that enable their classes to interact with other classrooms around the world, take virtual field trips, or experience someone’s digital storytelling about various topics.  For such a great resource in my state, I was surprised to not hear of it before, and many of my colleagues in my school haven’t either.  If you haven’t had a chance to check out the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills’ resource page, I highly recommend you do to explore what is available for you in your state!

Classroom Blog Uses in First Grade

Upon thinking about the uses of blogging in first grade, I came up with a few ways that blogs could be incorporated into my classroom.  For starters, it could easily remain as an interactive communication device between parents and me.  Feeds could be about what we are currently working on in class and how parents could support the learning at home.  I have already discussed this idea with several of my students’ parents, and they were very excited with the opportunity to help direct their child’s learning and offer ways to further enrich the curriculum through their various expertises from their occupations.  For example, while working on our drawing skills, one parent who is a physical therapist, has suggested how they could post exercises that promote fine motor skills for other parents to practice with their children at home too.

Another useful tool would be to display and discuss student work.  While my students are not able to write much, what they can do they are very proud of.  Displaying their work with an audio file of them discussing their work would be very exciting to them.  In a way, the blog would then be a classroom portfolio that would demonstrate students’ growth throughout the year.  We could easily return at any time to discuss student work and what skills they have developed from posts that are months apart.  This is a skill that I always struggle with because students frequently misplace their work or have taken it home  when it would be nice to refer back to on occasion during the closures of our workshops.  This digital copy would ensure that their work is always readily available.

What are your thoughts on blogging in the primary grades?  Given the limited ability of younger students, I would love to hear anyone’s creative ideas for including them more in the blogging process in a way they would comprehend.

Welcome!

Hi everyone,
Welcome to the start of my first blog.  Since I teach first grade, my plan is to get more accustomed to blogging and then focus on creating a blog that serves as a new way to communicate with my students’ parents.   I’m really excited to be able to communicate in a new format and thought about including projects we are currently working on, field trips we will be taking, and any special events we may be having.  Please let me know if anyone has any advice in items I could include in a parent blog.  I would love to include any new ideas someone has used in the past or haa recently thought of.
Thank you,
Matt