21st Century Skills website review

Today I am going to review the website Partnership for 21st Century Skills. http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/


This is a very informative website. The site provides a wealth of information on what 21st century skills are. On the home page the claim is made that in order to continue to compete in the global job market United States schools need to join together the traditional 3 Rs with the new 4 Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation). To make this vision a reality 21st Century Skills has partnered with many businesses and states to bring the 4 Cs into the curriculum.
The FAQ on the website is very informative, as are most of the other pages, and it answers many of the questions people might have if they were new to the idea of molding schools to fit into the 21st century workplace. I personally enjoyed the state initiatives sections. I was surprised to discover my state of North Carolina was the first state with a center for 21 century skills back in 2005. Unfortunately for the state, I did not know about the center so it is hard for me to judge the impact of to center’s efforts.

Though the website is very informative, I have several issues with the site itself. The first is that it promotes the need for 21st century skills but the site itself is boring. It uses a basic template with no variation. If I were creating a website to emphasize the importance of skills that include using technology I would want the website to be impressive not bland. There is a video section which seems to be the only multimedia page of the website, but I do not know what the section is for. I tried to watch a video and could not make it through the entire thing. It appeared that the purpose of the video was to show a good essential question for a lesson. The video only has 390 hits and since a class that I am taking brought me to the site, most of those hits have probably come from my classmates. Even the video page is poorly designed. The other videos are all in thumbnails but you can tell what any of them are because the titles of all of the videos are cut off because they do not fit in the provided space.

The other big issue that I have with this site is that it feels very lofty in its ambitions without any apparent practical solutions. There are no sections for classroom ideas. There is definitely not a section specifically for math teachers that gives ideas for how to incorporate 21st century skills into various lessons that a math teacher could teach. This site might have value for a politician but from what I could find it has very little value for a teacher or their students beyond the importance of the idea itself.

In conclusion, I find the premise of the site to be important and necessary for the future of education but the execution of the site leaves a lot to be desired, especially for educators who are looking for help incorporating 21st century ideas into their classrooms.

Blogs in the math classroom:

At the end of each math class my class writes an answer to the day’s essential question in our notebooks at the end of the day’s notes. I could set up a class blog where I list all of the essential questions and I could have student post one or two of their answers to the essential questions each week. The students could then see other student’s responses, compare them, see if their answers were on the right track, and get into discussion about differences between responses. This would also give me an opportunity to see what my students answers are to the essential question so I could see how well they grasp the material.


What makes this idea difficult is that I teach high school mathematics in an urban school district. In my Algebra classes over half of the students do not have computers at home or do not have easy internet access. It would be impossible for me to do anything where I expected participation outside of the classroom because I would alienate the section of students who do not have computer access. This means that any time spent blogging would have to be class time. This would be at least 45 minutes every week going down to the computer lab, logging onto our decrepit old computers (a 4-5 minute process), and interacting on the blog.

In our Algebra classes we try not to slow down because we do not have spare minutes to waste in a class that is crammed beyond capacity. Every year we choose which topics to not teach our students because we will run out of time by the end of the course. To decide whether this is a good idea and to justify the time expense, I would need to determine if there is a weekly 45 minute chuck of time that my class spends doing something that is less educationally advantageous than an essential question blog. At the present time I think it would be more efficient if I had students pair up or get in groups of four for fifteen minutes once a week and have them share their answers and discuss each essential question for three minutes.