My Reflection on BLC09

It was a great opportunity for me to attend Building Learning Communities Conference last week in Boston. There was a lot of good and innovative ideas about creating more learning communities in schools. To me, I believe that technology is the vehicle to make learning more fun and interesting to students. Students like to use technology. In fact, students are more abreast of new technological gadgets than teachers and most adults in their life. I asked students after I came back from the conference about how often they use Twitter or Face book. To my surprise, they were more familiar with these things more than me. Now, the task is on educators to use this in their advantage by creating learning communities in their schools through the use of technology.

Part of my plan is to start a Twitter network in my school for teachers and all staff members to connect socially. Even better, my principal is planning to start a Twitter group with other principals in her network so they all can share best practice ideas. It was very interesting to see the former Superintendent of Illinois school districts talking about how he started a social network with central staff in his office through Twitter. Principals then followed along and started same project in their own schools. This is an example of how technology can be a great tool to create venues of communication in professional settings.

21 Century Skills

I would like to share with you some of the very interesting ideas I learned in one of yesterdays workshops at BLC09. What skills do students need to have in the 21 century? This was the question asked and discussed in this session. A hard question to answer...not really. Teachers and educators in general know what skill sets students need to be equipped with for the 21 century.
The issue is what are schools doing to accomplish this mission. I personally believe that the focus of the schools get to shift to teaching content and preparing students to pass standardized exams. It was interesting to observe the presenter presenting the issue of teaching the 21 century skills in every day lessons. Teachers need to embed these skills (such as perseverance, awareness, courage and adaptability) in their lessons. Recent surveys show that 21 century employers are seeking candidates with these characters. Students need to understand and know what it takes to become a hard worker or problem solver. To equip students for the new demands of the workforce in the 21 century, it is essential to establish strategies in schools that instill these skills in each one of them.