Final Comments

My greatest success in this course was using the tools provided and bringing them to life in the classroom. I feel like my teaching has improved and my students have benefited. The biggest challenge was leaning manipulation of the tools to provide a product. It all just takes time and patience. I improved on providing assessment for the tasks using 21st century skills for my students. I will continue to try to implement all of the tools as much as possible into my instruction and make my lessons more engaging and enjoyable. This course has changed my teaching practices and given me the knowledge and confidence to push forward.

The Future...

Well it seems as the push for a national core curriculum is on the horizon, there will be many changes throughout,  including an infusion of technology standards and assessments that will be an important part of instruction. This should be interesting!

Rubrics

Hello everyone! It's snowing in Maryland! In my quest to find rubrics, I came across two useful sites. It appears that in the near future, we will be crating our own for assessing 21st century skills.
Rubric links
Rubric

One more...

http://azjd.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/five-skills-for-21st-century-learners/

Links

http://wsfcsintouch.blogspot.com

Reflection

I ran across many interesting blogs in my research. The ones centered around 21st century literacy all had the same underlying principles but they all agreed that educators must teach in a fashion that uses up to date lessons that incorporate  current technology.

Literacy in classrooms today...

http://wsfcsintouch.blogspot.com

This is a great way of explaining how 21st century skills are applied to educators.

Five Skills for 21st Century Learners

This article caught my attention as the writer narrowed the list down into five essential skills as he is planning a new school for 7th and eighth graders. He had to propose his plans to the board  and explain how his school would be different from a traditional learning environment.He made a list of five essential skills he wants his students to possess before going to high school. One of the five listed was student engagement. He makes a good point by saying that "student engagement is perhaps the most misunderstood, and overused term in education." I have to agree there. He says "engagement is not about paying attention, it is about being an active participant in one's education." Good point.

Five Skills for 21st Century Learners « Molehills out of Mountains

On with technology!

Today we read our mini fairy tale story books and used audacity to practice reading them for fluency. We got to hear our fluency improve with our repeated readings. How cool!

First Graders and Technology

This week we created a photo story as a class for math vocabulary. Learning math vocab can be boring but using this as an introduction kept the students engaged as they loved seeing their pictures and hearing their voices!