Journal #4 Create, Collaborate, Communicate: Empowering Students With 21st Century Skills

Riedel, Chris (2009, January). Create, Collaborate, Communicate: Empowering Students with 21st Century Skills. T.H.E. Journal, Retrieved April 22,2009, from http://www.thejournal.com/articles/23872_2

Although technology usage is a common occurrence in the daily lives of most students, schools have yet to widely embrace this 21st century phenomenon, which author Chris Riedel argues is ill-preparing students for future success as more and more professions are utilizing these technology tools. Students need to not only become readers and writers of content, but have experience as editors and collaborators as well, in order to be desirable employees in the future as employers are looking for individuals with creative problem solving and critical thinking skills that are able to quickly gather and evaluate data. The article outlines the top 16 ways to implement technology in the classroom and prepare students to be successful leaders of tomorrow with ideas such as collaborating with GoogleDocs, teaching students how to assess the validity of information and evaluate the content of a webpage, using social bookmarking, and promoting 1:1 computing so ALL students have equal access to technology.

Question #1 Which of these suggestions would you implement in your classroom?
GoogleDocs is a powerful tool, both for basic word processing (allowing students who don't have access to Microsoft Word to create documents and make it easy to transport documents from one computer to another without having to rely on email or flash drives) and for collaboration with other students. Since learning about collaborations with GoogleDocs, I have been using this tool frequently to work on projects with others both in and outside of this class, and would enthusiastically implement it with my students as it is easy to use. Using Delicious for social bookmarking is another useful tool, especially when it comes to group research projects, allowing students to share their discoveries with each other, making it much easier to do successful research when divided among the many. I also think it's important to use real-world scenarios as often as possible when teaching students. Students become more involved with learning when simulations are used to present various concepts since the learning is often "fun", as well as it prevents unnecessary "why are we learning this" whining.

Question #2 How can teachers who are unfamiliar with technology successfully educate their students?
One of the "Top 16" suggestions was to "Hug a Geek"- to befriend people who are knowledgeable with technology and thrive in the digital world and ask for help. If I were a school administrator, I would require all of my staff to take a technology survey, such as the "Ed Tech Profile" to assess individual strengths and weaknesses, and assign the more "tech-savvy" staff members as mentors to help out those who were struggling. That way they could better understand and become more comfortable with technology and be able to better educate their students