Partnership for 21st Century Skills

As I navigated and read through the Partnership for 21st Century Skills website I was overwhelmed by the amount of information discussed. I liked how each section on the table of contents page was typed in a different color, this made it very easy to go back and re-read certain sections on the site. The fact that each section was titled, was helpful to me because it gave me a good idea about what I would be reading.

I was somewhat surprised to hear information that supported a shift from standardized testing as I know it, to that of a more broad testing of academic and work related skills. I am currently in my fifth year of teaching and all I have ever heard is teach the standards and benchmarks that will directly effect the FCAT scores. It seems everything we are doing in Florida is related to the FCAT test, even the reading assessments we use are ultimately a prediction on how well the students will perform on FCAT test.

The article stated: Today's education system faces irrelevance unless we bridge the gap between how student's learn and how student's live. WOW! As a educator this statement absolutely floored me because at my school we don't embrace the vast amount of knowledge our students have when it comes to technology, we dismiss it because all we care about is how well they perform on the FCAT test. When a student receives a failing score on the FCAT we just assume this student is a poor reader or he/she is lazy, but what we have not considered is the disconnect between how we as teachers prepared them and how technology influences how they learn.


Jerry Brown








Overall I thought this site was very user friendly and contained some very good information.

Blogging in the classroom...

I am currently teaching a learning strategies class to high school special education students. This class is designed to help teach special education students test taking, note taking, and organizational strategies that they can implement into their regular education classes.Although the strategies I teach are very helpful to the students, I believe the students could use blogging to further enhance their knowledge base of strategies they can use in class. I would like to see the students use their blogging skills to interact with other high school special education students and share the different learning strategies they have learned. They could share what strategies work the best and which ones are not beneficial to them. I believe the information my students receive from the blogging experience could help me gain a better understanding for what strategies my students actually think would help them in their regular education classes

Jerry Brown-Progress Monitoring

Hello everyone, I am a high school ESE teacher in Florida and my school district has begun to put a huge emphasis into the progress monitoring of ESE students. As of now we are required to put a hard copy of a monitoring sheet in each teachers mailbox in order to get feedback from them. Besides the fact that the use of all the paper is not good for the enviorment, it is also very time consuming! Does anyone have any ideas or experience on how to get these monitoring sheets out to the teachers via our school e-mail system, while still maintaining the privacy of our students?