21st Century Skills

The Denver Post
The growing influence of technology is creating “new literacies” in which traditional skills of reading and writing are merged with 21st-century skills. Researchers say that technology requires students to think more critically when faced with an overwhelming amount of information available on the Internet, but that it also can prompt deeper reading as [...]

eSchool News 
The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) are calling on teacher education programs to update their curricula to better prepare future teachers to integrate 21st-century skills into their instruction.
The groups released a paper on Sept. 23 seeking to establish a shared vision for infusing [...]

Beyond School (Education Week Blog) 
An assortment of education groups is urging Congress to make funding for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program flexible and open to expanded school day schedule initiatives, as well as after-school and summer school efforts.
Only a few weeks ago, a Senate subcommittee approved a plan to expand funding for the [...]

eSchool News 
In what could be called a 21st-century teachers’ fair, Microsoft chose a select group of educators to participate in the company’s annual Innovative Education Forum (IEF)—a showcase of the best teacher-created projects that incorporate 21st-century skills and effective uses of education technology. IEF is part of Microsoft’s Innovative Teachers program, a global community of [...]

Education Week 
There’s been building momentum to address the discrepancy between the demand for workers in computer science fields and the supply of qualified candidates produced by the educational system. Now, the U.S. Congress may have a chance to enact legislation on it.
Colorado Rep. Jared Polis, a Democrat, introduced the Computer Science Education Act on Friday, [...]

Education Week  
A Senate subcommittee added $100 million to the proposed fiscal 2011 appropriation for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program yesterday. This sounds good, right? But not so fast, as after-school advocates say the addition may actually take money away from after-school programs and shift those dollars to efforts to support longer school days [...]

THE Journal 
A new program at Carnegie Mellon University is aimed at capitalizing on students’ interest in robots to encourage them to study science, technology, engineering and math. Officials with the Fostering Innovation through Robotics Exploration — or FIRE — initiative plan to create robotics competitions, develop computer programs for students and create computerized tutors to [...]

eSchool News 
Working with national arts organizations, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) has developed a first-of-its-kind Arts skills map that clearly defines how arts education promotes key 21st-century skills. The map, the fifth in a series of core content maps from P21 (others include Geography, Science, Social Studies, and English), gives examples how critical [...]

Education Week 
Given the ways computer technology—from the iPhone and YouTube to uses in medical research and national security—is changing so many facets of life, you might imagine that schools have been stepping up students’ exposure to computer science to help drive the digital revolution.
But recent data suggest otherwise. One survey indicates a sizable drop in [...]

eSchool News 
An interface that allows hearing-impaired people to communicate with others using an augmented-reality environment took home the grand prize of $25,000 in the eighth annual Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals in Poland, a prestigious international programming contest for high school and college students. Team Skeek, a team of university students from Thailand, was responsible for [...]

eSchool News 
U.S. schools’ average overall scores on an annual survey designed to measure their progress toward implementing 21st-century classrooms and learning skills increased less than 1 percent from 2009, even though schools did improve on four out of five measures of progress.
The Vision K-20 survey, from the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), was developed [...]

eSchool News 
According to a new report, 21st-century teaching and learning can only occur if teachers and school staff work together as a collaborative team; simple adjustments to antiquated school policies and structures that are already in place won’t help.
The research brief, titled “Team Up for 21st Century Teaching and Learning: What Research and Practice Reveal [...]

eSchool News 
School librarians fear another round of budget cuts in districts across the nation could severely impair students’ development of information literacy and other key 21st-century skills.
As the school budget crisis deepens, administrators have started to view school libraries as luxuries that can be axed, rather than places where kids learn to love reading and [...]

eSchool News 
Just 8 percent of high school teachers said that technology is fully integrated into the classroom; and the technology that is available is primarily used by teachers, and not students, according to the results of a national survey of more than 1,000 high school students, faculty, and IT staff members. As a result, 43 [...]

eSchool News 
Contrary to popular opinion, newer teachers aren’t any more likely to use technology in their lessons than veteran teachers, and a lack of access to technology does not appear to be the main reason why teachers do not use it: These are among the common perceptions about education technology that new research from Walden [...]

Newsweek   
A slew of recent studies show that the problem for women in math and science is related to something both larger and more nuanced: culture. In high school, girls only take 17 percent of computer-science AP tests. They earn only 18 percent of computer and information-science degrees in college, and they make up just under [...]

Education Week 
K-12 and postsecondary institutions are moving toward a vision of technology-rich, 21st-century education, albeit very slowly, says a new survey by the education division of the Washington-based Software and Information Industry Association, or SIIA. The vision, outlined by SIIA, measures schools on 21st century tools, anytime/anywhere access, differentiated learning, assessment tools, and enterprise support. [...]

eSchool News 
Reluctant faculty members, challenges in scanning old texts with foreign characters, and conflicting ideas about whether information should be commodified or made free on the internet have been barriers to educators and librarians who advocate for digital libraries, according to research conducted by digital media experts from Rice University and the University of Michigan.
Their [...]

New York Times 
Schools across the country are incorporating project-based engineering lessons into the science curriculum — even at the kindergarten level — prompted by concerns about preparing U.S. students to compete in a global economy. Supporters say the engineering focus stimulates creativity and problem-solving while reinforcing science and math skills, but critics question whether students [...]

eSchool News  
How can technology be leveraged to deliver a world-class education affordably to students in developing countries? That’s the question a new competition asks, and the best idea will earn $10,000 for its creator.
Many school-age children in developing countries need access to educational opportunities, and the publication The Economist and InnoCentive Inc. have turned to [...]

Education Week 
After a couple of false starts in recent weeks amid partisan wrangling, the U.S. House of Representatives today approved a bill to reauthorize the America COMPETES Act, legislation that contains a strong focus on improving education in the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
The final vote was 262 to 150, with 17 Republicans joining [...]

THE Journal  
The 2010 We Can Change the World Challenge awarded top prizes to teams of K-8 students that developed the best plans rooted in science, technology, engineering and math that would spur community action to improve the environment.
Full story

Education Week  
President Barack Obama has said that America faces “few more urgent challenges than preparing our children to compete in a global economy.” Being able to understand and make use of the world’s vast telecommunications infrastructure is certainly part of that preparation. So it was no surprise when the White House issued its Cyberspace Policy [...]

eSchool News 
A project to show youth-produced videos on 2,200 Los Angeles city buses, the next generation of a graphical programming language that allows young people to create their own interactive features, and an online game that teaches kids the environmental impact of their personal choices are among 10 winning projects that will share $1.7 million [...]

MercuryNews.com  
One chapter is closing—and another is opening—as Stanford University moves toward the creation of its first “bookless library,” a smaller but more efficient and largely electronic library that can accommodate the vast, expanding, and interrelated literature of Physics, Computer Science, and Engineering. “The role of this new library is less to do with shelving and [...]

eSchool News 
It was strike two for a major science funding bill on May 19 as House Republicans again united to derail legislation they said was too expensive. Going down to defeat was an updated version of the America COMPETES Act, legislation that would have committed more than $40 billion over three years to boost funding [...]

The results from Unleashing the Future: Educators “Speak Up” about the use of Emerging Technologies for Learning, a recent survey on education technology, suggest that schools are making progress on integrating technology into the curriculum—but the survey also reveals key disparities in how students, educators, administrators, and even aspiring teachers think of various technology tools.
To read [...]

eSchool News 
Aiming to engage students who are multitasking with different forms of technology, companies are creating collaborative learning spaces online where students can help one another solve homework problems and study—all while building important 21st-century skills.
Full story

Education Week 
At a time when it’s hard to find bipartisanship in Washington, it appears that legislation to reauthorize the America COMPETES Act may prove a noteworthy exception. Yesterday, the House Science and Technology Committee by a vote of 29-8 approved a wide-ranging bill to reauthorize the law, which includes a strong emphasis on improving education [...]

eSchool News 
Employers are looking for candidates who can navigate, critically evaluate, and make sense of the wealth of information available through digital media—and now educators have a new way to determine a student’s baseline digital literacy with a certification exam that measures the test-taker’s ability to assess information, think critically, and perform a range of [...]

Roll Call
A coalition of business groups is lobbying Congress for more federal support for science and math education programs. The Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education Coalition wants to set a goal of graduating 400,000 university students in STEM subjects by the year 2020, which is double the number today. “We need to help the [...]

Education Daily
In a race to reauthorize the America COMPETES Act this year, the House Science and Technology Committee gleaned input from industry stakeholders on ways to advance student achievement in science, technology, engineering and mathematics by scaling effective programs authorized in the legislation and through other strategies such as public-private partnerships.

Education Week
A new study finds that scientists’ initial interest in their subject is often sparked before they enter middle school, a conclusion the researchers suggest has implications for rethinking policy efforts aimed at getting more young people to become scientists.
The federally funded study examines the experiences reported by 116 scientists and graduate students that first [...]

Education Week
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators this week introduced legislation to promote and improve engineering education in schools.
Full story

Just in time for the 2010 Winter Olympiad taking place in Vancouver, BC this February, NBC Universal (NBCU) has teamed up with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to produce “The Science of the Olympic Winter Games,” a 16-part educational video series that gives students extensive insight into the physics, physiology, and related science of sports [...]

Nickelodeon, whose pre-school television shows focus on teaching social skills as much as letters and numbers, is moving squarely into the academic realm with the introduction of “Team Umizoomi,” which it said is the only pre-school series focused entirely on teaching math to children.
Read the full story from the New York Times.

The push to install technology-rich language labs is growing, so much so in some places that parent fundraising organizations are making it the focus of their efforts. Educators who use the labs say that they allow students to spend significantly more time doing language-practice exercises, such as hearing themselves speak. The labs also take away [...]

Reflecting the expanding responsibilities of technology directors and heightened demand for schools to build students’ 21st-century skills, the Consortium for School Networking has updated its framework detailing how chief technology officers, or CTOs, can become educational leaders in their districts.
The revised “Framework of Essential Skills of the K-12 Chief Technology Officer,” released last week, comes [...]

eSchool News
President Barack Obama on Nov. 23 announced the launch of several nationwide programs to help motivate and inspire students to excel in science and math, including a grassroots effort called “”National Lab Day”” and a White House science fair. Obama identified three overarching priorities for STEM education: increasing STEM literacy so all students can [...]

THE Journal
The Tucson-based Partnership for 21st Century Skills has announced the release of its Milestones for Improving Learning and Education (MILE) Guide, a resource designed to aid schools and districts in fully and effectively integrating 21st century skills into policy and curricula. The MILE Guide offers a complete framework for 21st century skills integration into [...]

THE Journal
PBS Teacherline, the online preK-12 professional development resource of the Public Broadcasting Service, will provide professional development courses and teaching resources to encourage the teaching of climate change topics in conjunction with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. The new services are the result of a NASA Global Climate Change Education (GCCE) Grant.
Full [...]

EdWeek
Word slipped out at today’s meeting of the National Board for Education Sciences that the final regulations for the Race to the Top program, which are due to be published any day now, will include a big focus on science, technology, engineering, and math or STEM subjects.
Full story

Although parents, K-12 students, and educators agree that using technology is essential to learning and student success, parents are largely dissatisfied with the technology skills their children are learning in schools, according to a new analysis of survey data released Oct. 29 by the nonprofit Project Tomorrow and Blackboard Inc.
Read the full story from eSchool [...]

The nanotechnology industry will employ an estimated 2 million people worldwide by 2015, and with President Obama calling on colleges to ready students for the field, an Illinois-based company has introduced a program designed to teach the complex subject to undergraduates. NanoInk introduced the 12-week learning system, called NanoProfessor, in May.
Read the full story from [...]

Conclusions from a new study question the belief that students are not choosing STEM careers because they are underprepared or short on talent. Despite popular opinion, the flow of qualified math and science students through the American education pipeline is strong—except among high-achievers, who appear to be defecting to other college majors and fields. Researchers [...]

Project Tomorrow has kicked off Speak Up 2009, the latest in the organization’s series of annual surveys focused on 21st century teaching, learning, parenting, and administration. The survey is used as a gauge of opinion and practices in education, with a particular emphasis on technology topics, such as the use of Web 2.0 tools, mobile [...]

When high school and middle school science teachers engage in extracurricular research work, their students benefit. That’s the result of a new study published in Science last week by researchers at Columbia University. In addition, they found that such extracurricular research work can also bring economic benefits to schools and communities.
Read the full story from [...]

In a move that could help states procure part of the $4.3 billion Race to the Top Fund, the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) on Sept. 21 released the first official public draft of their Common Core State Standards.
The college and career readiness standards in English and [...]

The organization Common Core, which calls for giving students strong grounding across academic disciplines, has organized an open letter critiquing the program put forward by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and calling for the group to revise its goals.
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills promotes the cultivation of a broad range of critical-thinking, creative, [...]

Author of the book Empowering Students with Technology and longtime education technology advocate Alan November told educators and IT administrators last month that schools and colleges should reassess how they fund their ed-tech initiatives. Asking what teachers and students need, November said, should trump the persistent push for more technology staffing and equipment.
 
Despite the proliferation [...]

Across the nation, alternative-route program officials say they are seeing increasing enrollments from career-changers with strong backgrounds in the highly sought-after fields of math, science, and technology. But the extent to which school district administrators are primed to take advantage of larger—and in some cases stronger—talent pools in those fields depends on the officials’ ability [...]

Nokia and the Pearson Foundation have launched a new film series, called “A 21st Century Education,” that profiles a dozen acclaimed school-reform leaders from around the world. In individual, mostly black-and-white documentary profiles, these leaders put forward fresh, sometimes challenging, approaches to learning. Together, the 12 first-person films in the series explore three related themes, [...]

A discussion draft of the framework for the national assessment of technological literacy, the first to gauge students’ understanding of and skill in using a range of tools, has been presented to the board that oversees the testing program. The computer-based National Assessment of Educational Progress in technological literacy, scheduled to be administered to a [...]

An innovative and potentially ground-breaking approach to 21st century education is placing baby boomer retirees from STEM fields into “learning teams” with educators in an attempt to give students knowledge from real-life science and math experts.
Click here to read the full story from eSchool News.

As the push to train more young people in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — careers gains steam, a few prominent skeptics are warning that it may be misguided — and that rhetoric about the USA losing its world pre-eminence in science, math and technology may be a stretch. The slow growth of [...]

Researchers at the University of North Texas are studying the effectiveness of a computer simulation program, called simSchool, that is designed to prepare teachers for the modern youngster and help stem the flight of educators from the nation’s classrooms. Future teachers play what amounts to a game where they must respond to simulated classroom situations [...]

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has teamed with the National Science Teachers Association and the National Council for Geographic Education to launch the latest in its series of 21st century roadmaps for core academic subjects, in this case K-12 science and geography.
The 21st Century Skills and Science Map and the 21st Century Skills and [...]

The ability to adapt is one of the best qualities a business can have in today’s quickly changing world — and it’s no different for higher-education institutions. Community colleges offer several examples of programs that went from the drawing board to the classroom very quickly as their leaders try to anticipate the needs of tomorrow’s [...]

Experts say the attention and resources being paid by educators and policymakers in other countries to developing students’ technical skills could put U.S. students behind the curve very soon.
Australia, Britain, China, and South Korea have launched plans to ensure that all students have the tools, as well as the essential knowledge and skills, to [...]

For some schools, the future is now, as they look to transform traditional classrooms into 21st-century digitally friendly work spaces.
Click here to read the full story from Education Week’s Digital Directions.

Responding to a key need, schools of education are ramping up efforts to prepare future teachers to integrate technology into their instruction. An increasing number of schools–large and small, wealthy and less so–are integrating technology into their classrooms. There is a disconnect between the technology that exists in schools today and the training that pre-service [...]

States offering students curriculum options that integrate key 21st-century skills would receive matching federal funds through an incentive bill introduced in the U.S. Senate May 13 by West Virginia Democrat John D. Rockefeller IV. The legislation was developed using ideas generated from West Virginia educators and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, which researched and [...]

This issue brief provides guidance to states as they respond to requirements presented in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA 2004) in the area of dropout prevention for students with disabilities. It also highlights the role of State Performance Plans as starting points for states to develop data collection and monitoring procedures, and supplies states with considerations and recommendations for providing a consistent method of tracking dropout data.