What do we need to teach our students to be successful in the 21st Century? Take a look the Partnership for 21st Century Skills Framework
. How could these be implemented in your classroom? What are the benefits of implementing these skills for your students?

We need to teach our students to access information efficiently and effectively. We need to teach students to evaluate information sources for their relevancy and reliability. Students need to learn how to assimilate the information, analyze its usefulness, and interpret and explain the information.

Communication in the 21st century is not limited to accessing information. It also includes the skills necessary to exchange and manipulate information. Students need to be aware of the tools to communicate with others, and how those communication tools can be used to manipulate and control unsuspecting audiences. The 21st century provides many new avenues of exploration. It has created a number of areas where students can be misled or harmed without proper analytical skills.

I saw this video on connectivism at MEGT. It is an interesting concept of education that allows a student to build his or her own knowledge base and information sources. My only concern has been those students that are still reading at second and third grade level. These students are not being adequately served when it comes to researching complex topics. I have a student who is researching the issue of cloning.
However, most sources related to cloning are written above this student's reading level. I've had to read most of the articles to the student and guide this child's analysis of the information. This is not very 21st century. The other issue regarding connectivism is the issue of access. 27% of my students do not have access to a computer on a daily basis. Throwing out the text book would not work for them.

What has been your most successful lesson where you have integrated technology so far? What made it successful? How would you modify it for the next time you use it? What are some other ways you are planning on integrating technology this year?

My most successful lesson is teaching DOL using the smartboard. Students are able to make corrections on the board. They can highlight information, make corrections to the text,and move information around to focus on specific parts of the lesson. I would like to integrate more work with editing longer pieces. However, because of the need to have the text large, to be viewed from the back of the room. It may not be possible to edit large chunks of material at a time. I would also like to project pages from a novel and work on margin annotations. However, the same problem exists. How to make an entire page visible considering the constraints of the technology.

Favorite Smart Board Lesson

I wrote an introductory paragraph as an example for my students' research papers. I then had students go the the board and highlight and label the various elements of the paragraph. The elements included the first sentence of the paragraph, thesis statement, sentence listing subtopics, and the transition sentence to the first paragraph.

Students learned to use the tools of the Smart Board and had to analyze the paragraph to correctly identify import elements.