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.
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I came to the same conclusions as you did. While this site gave a lot of information on theories and beliefs, I saw little evidence of the organization taking action. As an educator myself, I kept asking myself "So what's the point? How do I accomplish what the Partnership's desired goals?" There is no practical, daily advice on the site which will help me improve my instruction to better prepare my students.
ReplyDeleteI also agree about the set up of the website itself. I found myself easily confused by the links and it took me awhile to successfully navigate the page to find the information I was looking for. Even now I still feel I got lucky by clicking on some random title and actually finding useful information. I would expect more from a site that is all about the 21st century.
I wish this site would do justice to the cause that it is promoting. These skills are vital to our students but the website does nothing to showcase these skills.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your gripes about the creativity and technical basis behind the P21 website. It definitely felt very bland. You have to wonder why a website about a corporation that strives to push the agenda of the importance of skills such as creativity and communication falls short on showcasing them in any impressive way.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I did find the page colorful and easy to navigate through, but the overall impression I got was of a page created out of necessity for corporate communication. It was not a website highlighting the creative spark that we are looking to ignite within our students.
I agree that the site was very informative as well. It did give a good definition as to what is expected in the 21st century classroom, but yes I also feel that some ideas to help teachers do this would be beneficial to the cause. I think as teachers we all agree that something needs to be done, but the problem is how we can do it. I did not even realize that there was not a section for classroom ideas, I actually didn’t think of it until it was mentions, but I think by having a section dedicated to this topic would better promote it nationally.
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