21st Century

"Today's education system faces irrelevance unless we bridge the gap between how students live and how students learn." I think this quote says everything we as educators face in today's schools. We are trying to focus on teaching the standards so much in order to pass THE test, that we lose focus on how important it is to teach in a manner that reaches our students on many different levels. On the 21st Century website it gives several areas that need to be worked on in order to reach our students as 21st Century scholars. It said we still must teach the core subjects first and then move on to teaching the 21st century skills. We could also learn a lot about how to incoorperate the 21st Century skills into our core subject area curriculum. It would make it much easier to teach the subject areas in a meaningful way for students to retain the information they need.


Reference:http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/images/stories/otherdocs/p21up_Report.pdf

I teach PE and Health so using a blog in PE is not really practical, however, using it in Health is something I would love to begin doing. I think that using a blog would be a great place to have discussions between students regarding topics discussed in Health. I would love to post a prompt and assign the students to post a comment on how they feel regarding the prompt. They would then have to reply to two other students' comments and discuss the ideas presented by each student. I think that 7th and 8t hgraders would love this assignment and I belive I would get much much more out of my students regarding their ideas and thoughts.

Trisha Smart (Faulkner)

I teach 7th and 8th grade Health and have a great relationship with my students. That relationship has given me some insights into what is going on with some students in our school system. I have struggled with how to get my students to realize that the choices they make right now in their personal life and in their academic life can affect them for the rest of their lives. It is something I stress every day, every semester, every year, but I still feel as if some of my students have not gotten the point. If anyone has any ideas into how I can reach my students on that level I would greatly appreciate some feedback!!