21 st Century Skills

It terrifies me to think of the disconnect that the education environment has to the business environment. We are not always flexible, we still have students sitting in rows from 8 – 3. Most of modern communication systems are blocked in the classroom and we are isolated in classrooms limiting collaboration. The business world is embracing technology much quicker than the educational world.

As a teacher in my school, we have the spectrum of teachers trying to embrace technology while others are avoiding it. We all have access to a web portal through our district web page, but less than 20% of the teachers post information on it. We have the same statistics for our electronic grade book (which is not available online to parents). These programs do not even begin to address the wealth of online tools known as Web2.0, a read/write web.

Except for some small pockets of innovative staff, teachers are still operating in the industrial age.

Ok, now for the realitiy check.
I use technology every day: electronic grading programs, maintaining a teacher web portal and communicating to parents and colleagues by email. But I do not always have the tools in our work environment to achieve this such as access to a computer during my prep. We do not have any computers in the staff room, that would be heaven! I have one computer in my classroom, but during my prep, another teacher is teaching in my room, so I do not stay in my room. When I try to correct student work for my computer programming class, I need to load the student’s work from the server, which I also can not access from home. It is imperative I purchase a computer at home to do my work. After I have completed all of this daily work in the evening, it is exhausting to begin prepping an innovative use of technology in my classroom, but I do because I am very passionate about it. But then, when I have prepped a lesson at home, it will not work in our labs due to restrictions and blocked sites. It is often these frustrations that cause teachers to follow the path of least resistance, which in our industrial environment is not the use of technology.

What skills do we need to be preparing our students to have in the 21st Century?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
Are we teaching them?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l72UFXqa8ZU