Partnership for 21st Century Skills

I must admit, that as I read Partnership for 21st Century Skills, I could not help but think that this is common sense.  I agree with many of the comments that were discussed.  I do believe that public education does not properly prepare students for college or the workplace.  I also feel that the tools mentioned on the website are crucial and should be taught in our schools.  I believe that these tools must also be taught outside of school.  Government and our society holds education to very high standard with very high expectations yet education is always the first thing to lose funding.  This seems contradictory.  To provide our students with 21st century skills, our schools have to be given tools to be successful.  I feel that many of our hands are tied by our state and NCLB.  We as educators have very little freedom to develop lessons with more creativity due to mandated tests, standards, and the fear of a child not succeeding.  These are issues that most of our society, especially the work place, do not understand.  I believe that the most important quality of the 21st century skills was accountability.  Unfortunately, this trait seems to have been forgotten in our public education system.  For example, I gave my sophomore math classes a test that had 100 multiplication problems.  No number was greater than 12.  They had 5 minutes to complete the test.  I had less than 40% pass.  If accountability is left in our schools, how do students become 15 years old and can not multiply.  I also know that if a student is special ed, they pretty much have to shoot someone to get suspended for any length of time.  Zero accountability.  In the state of Georgia, all math teachers have heard term rigor for 4 straight years.  We must become more rigorous.  However, after End of Course Testing, the state decides to give students more options due to the amount of failing scores.  What does this teach students? I constantly hear how we are not educating our students to the level of other countries.  Other countries where education is valued and students have vocational options to learn traits. I do not see how we are comparing apples to apples.  I would love to hear from someone that has been apart of a educational system outside of the U.S.  How does it compare to our public education system?  I taught a girl from India and she said students in India were not disrespectful to teachers and students would face great consequences if they were.  Any thoughts?

Again, I do believe that 21st century skills are important and I believe that we need to do a better job to prepare students for the next level of their life.  I think to do this successfully, our leaders must begin to listen to those of us that actually educate in today's world rather than listening to people that have not been in classrooms for years or simply because someone supports the title Dr.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.  I have thick skin so please speak freely.

How Can Blogs Benefit The Classroom

I believe that blogging can be a very useful tool for teachers, students and parents.  Here are a few ways that I feel I could use blogging for my classroom:

Posting assignments for students and parents to see
Posting class syllabus with rules and regulations
Tutoring times
Test dates
School calendar
Links to websites that students could use for assistance and for extra practice
Letting students discuss the classwork with one another

I would like to hear your thoughts on my post as well as more examples of how to use blogs in our modern day classrooms.

Technology in the high school math classroom

Hello,
My name is Todd Cassell.  I currently teach and coach at Ridgeland High School in the northwest part of Georgia.  I teach high school Mathematics and coach football.

Technology has become a huge part of today's educational society.  I would like to get your views and comments on the benefits and disadvantages of this technology push in our schools today.  I would also love to hear any opinions, ideas, lessons plans, etc. on how to integrate technology into today's mathematics classroom.

Please feel free to post regardless of what you teach or whether you teach at all.  Also, feel free to post about any educational topic that you would like to discuss. It does not have to be math or technology related.  I would love to hear your thoughts.

Looking forward to some great discussions,
Todd Cassell