21st Century Skills Skills Skills Skills Skills and Skills

On our short walk to school, my wife and I were wishing we had a four day week. I mentioned that there were school districts in America where schools do have a four day work week for the purposes of saving money. Those are low cost Fridays – nobody has to fire up the boiler, prepare school lunches, or transport students to school. The downside is that the school day is an hour later and there isn’t any guarantee that this would be a more productive hour.

At the Partnership for the 21st Century, there is an interesting article about the outdated nature of schools and how learning environments do not necessarily have to be segregated by age, but instead can be ranked by ability. The idea of flex time is mentioned where students have a longer time line for assignments and projects.

After I read this article and recalling my morning conversation, I thought of having a “Work at home Wednesday”. This would be a time when the student would spend a minimum of four hours at home working on their computer. They could collaborate with classmates, follow guided lessons from their teacher, or otherwise be involved in independent study. The key to a program such as this would be accountability. Certainly technology could be created that would readily log all the academic activities performed by the stay at home student.

I would see a program such as this as beneficial for several reasons:

1) The students are given a “break” in the middle of the week.
2) Wednesday evenings are traditionally ceded to local religious organizations; therefore the sacred cow of education, evening sports competitions, would not be infringed upon.
3) The perennial problem of “snow days” would be solved. If the weather makes it unsafe for the students to go to school, the school can go to the students. There wouldn’t be the usual debate as to when days should be made up.
4) Schools will save money in regards to services they usually offer.

For this article alone, I found this a forward looking, worthwhile website.

What I found less valuable on the website was the throwing around of power words. “Skills” is mentioned incessantly in word and in the information video. I equate “skills” with “any verb you can think of”. There are breathing skills, eating skills, walking skills, skills in sleeping properly and spitting off a bridge skills. In today's political climate, to question the value of “skills” it to run the risk of being labeled a troglodyte. I feel that when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Once they explain what specific skills they are interested in, I will have a stronger opinion about their political agenda.

The Partnership for 20th Century Skills

Selling Ones Soul to Google

There seems to be an excessive amount of free services available. I would like to find services that having staying power so that I can use them year after year. With the very nature of digital technology, a natural selection takes place where some sites and technologies are run out of common use. When I look to instigate a technology plan for my students, I want something that is free, easy, and long living.

If I were to look into the future for the next five years, I would say it is a safe assumption that Google will remain an industry leader. For this reason, I will be having my students sign up for a g-mail account. With this g-mail account they may share documents on Google Documents. They will have an e-mail account that will be easy for me to remember [first name_last name_AIS2009 @ gmail.com] and they will have an easy to set up Blog through blogspot. Because it is so closely related to Google, a g-mail account is all that is needed to sign up. With Google, students may also subscribe to RSS feeds and share calendars. While I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket, I predict that Google is a good basket to place them in.

Lost in Cyberspace

Sorry for being a late-comer. I had posted some work on my school site. Periodically, like today, I will be linking non-blogger media files to my class website.

This particular link will take you to a PowerPoint presentation that I gave at the 2008 NESA Conference in Bangkok. It concerns the use of grade level websites:

http://aisgrade8.net/cblog/index.php?/archives/933-Grade-Level-Webpages.html

As you look through the slides, think of ways in which students can incorporate the grade level websites into their daily lives. Please post your comments back on this site.