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"As the workplace changes and becomes increasingly global, today's students must be educated with a 21st-century mindset. Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills are no longer just "good skills" to have; they are increasingly vital to a 21st-century education-and students should begin cultivating these skills as early as possible. Attracting students to the STEM disciplines is the first hurdle, and retaining student interest in these areas is the second. But once student interest in STEM-related fields is established, they will discover they are on a successful path not just for higher education, but for the workforce as well."

"Greetings Mappers: nWelcome to beautiful Saratoga Springs and to the Sixteenth Annual Curriculum Mapping Institute and Academies. The major theme for our institute this year is Curriculum21: Mapping the Future for our Learners. You are part of a contingent from across the United States joined by educators from Australia, the Bahamas, Europe, New Zealand, Japan, Central America, and the Middle East. "

"Alejandra Quaglia The world in which my students are growing up is changing very quickly. With smartphones, video games, wikis, blogs, texting, and e-mails as an integral part of their lives, students are multitaskers, fast-paced, and highly collaborative. Over the last 10 years, I've found that I can no longer apply teaching methods that were developed before the rise of technology. My students got bored, and they didn't pay much attention to highly structured textbook lessons. As a language arts teacher in the bilingual St. Andrew's Scots School in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I was determined to change my education approach to help prepare my students for our changing world."

"Narrator: Brooklyn Prospect Charter School in Brooklyn, New York, was founded by Luyen Chou and Dan Rubenstein. The school opened its doors just weeks before we visited them. Part of their vision: a commitment to developing 21st century skills in its diverse student population."

"Our room is a large semi-industrial studio. The students in the foreground are sitting in our Blogger's Lounge while in the distance, two students are projecting student work and leading a peer review session, and to the right a cluster of students have a chat session around a table to plan for their presentation; two more groups hang in our mini Mac lab just to the left of where this picture is cropped."

"The creation and maintenance of the Math Wiki by our Middle Schoolers was the perfect platform to expose students to an array of design tools to create tutorials for their classmates and other math students around the world."

"These 21st Century Skills Map are each the result of hundreds of hours of research, development and feedback from educators and business leaders across the nation."

"District administrators more likely to support certain technologies than teachers; pre-service teacher education lagging in 21st-century instructional methods"

"Students increasingly are taking education into their own hands with personal technology experiences, a trend with important implications for schools"

"Teens across the country are starting to play computer games in school - and their teachers encourage them. It's called three-dimensional learning, and it has little in common with the 1980s video arcades parents remember. In North Carolina, high school students who take an elective called "Computer Applications 2" get introduced to Second Life or ReactionGrid, 3-D virtual worlds in which each player has an avatar - like a digital sock puppet that the user controls. In at least one school district, middle school students sit down at computers to play 3-D games in math and language arts classes. Quantcast "

I am not an artist, but I am surrounded by artists- family, friends, colleagues, and young people. A million years ago (or maybe about three decades past), I worked through each of the lessons in Betty Edwards' first edition of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and struggled to brake the inertia of my well-designed, verbal-linguistic vehicle so that I could learn to see, not read, images in my world. I followed instructions to turn a vase upside down and draw it. After an intense attempt the result was…a lopsided, upside-down vase. "

"The WNY Young Writers' Studio is a community where teachers and young people come together to discover what good writing is, how to create it, and how to inspire others to do the same. Students of all ability levels will enjoy a variety of engaging activities designed to help them define their writing interests and discover their own unique voices."

"As to the question, "How do we support students developing as efficacious self-directed, social learners and involve parents as partners in that journey?" I offer a little of my own background here. I mostly directly teach undergraduates (and adults), so I deal with folks who have already been through a system that has largely (with some exceptions) encouraged them to be passive, to be attentive to the rules of the game, to be really, really conventionally successful (as defined by the institution), and who are often self-directed and social learners-OUTSIDE of the classroom. So long attentive to the rules of the game of school, they sometimes resent being asked to deeply engage in their own learning. Here's a little recollection of my own journey through this as a teacher…"

Excellent resource for staying up with current (and archived) technology-oriented teaching and learning focuses

Watch how Nash Rocky Mountain Early College High School uses EduPlatform in their 1:1 [computer/internet access] initiative, which integrates today's latest technologies into the classroom for 21st century learning.

"Today's kids are hardwired in a fundamentally different way than most of the adults who teach them. Every child from high school on down grew up immersed in a world of technology. None have known a world without visual computing. Many never saw a day in which broadband Net access wasn't delivered directly to one of the two or three PCs in their house. Other items within easy daily reach include a DVD, various cell phones, and game consoles."

Siliva continually gleans text or created paraphrases from Curriculum 21, by Heidi Hayes Jacobs et al.

"Schools have become unwitting coconspirators in the decline of reading. On a recent cross-country flight, I found myself sitting next to the president of a multimillion dollar computer software company. To keep his business competitive, he told me, his organization regularly recruits employees from top universities. When I asked him how his current recruitment efforts were going, he said that over the past few years it had become increasingly challenging to find qualified workers. It isn't difficult finding smart candidates; the problem is finding smart people who can think."

Traditional schools - with their lectures, homework, and report cards - aren't for everyone. Here are five alternative approaches to education.