Route 21 and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

At the SETDA Leadership Summit and Education Forum, we’ve been talking a lot about 21st century skills, so I thought it might be helpful to highlight some of the work that the Partnership for 21st Century Skills has been doing.

The Partnership has been quite busy lately. In October, it announced new poll results that showed that a significant majority of voters ‘are deeply concerned that the United States is not preparing young people with the skills they need to compete in the global economy.’ Here’s an excerpt from the full report:

As I noted on my blog earlier this week, on Monday the Partnership, SETDA, and ISTE released a paper on maximizing the impact of digital technologies for 21st century learning. The document contains examples of successful programs that can be used as models, guiding questions for stakeholders, and action principles for moving forward. Plus there’s also this great (if depressing) quote:

No industry or organization can remain competitive today without making comprehensive use of technology as a matter of course in all of its operations. . . . [E]ducation is the least technology-intensive enterprise in a ranking of technology use among 55 U.S. industry sectors, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Today the Partnership released a new resource, Route 21:

[Route 21] represents the first comprehensive, go-to online resource for high-quality content, best practices, relevant reports, articles and research to assist practitioners in implementing 21st century teaching practices and learning outcomes. Route 21 harnesses Web 2.0 features to allow users to tag, rank, organize, collect and share Route 21 content based on their personal interests. Individuals will continuously update the site with relevant examples as well as share their reactions and insights on implementing 21st century skills in their state, district or school.

You can read the press release, watch the 10–minute video, or dive right into the resources and tagging tools:

Also, for those of you who didn’t know, the Partnership recently updated its famous rainbow framework in order to better highlight essential supporting conditions:

[read more about the framework]

In addition to the resources already described, the Partnership has a number of useful reports, issue briefs, and literacy maps, the latter of which are intended to give some examples of 21st century literacies in practice. Many of the Partnership’s presentations are available online, as are some nifty tools for educators and policymakers.

In short, the Partnership is working hard to help us move our nation’s schools forward. There are numerous helpful resources on the Partnership’s main site and in Route 21. I encourage you to check out what the Partnership has to offer.

Comments

[Robert]

1.

I agree that the next generation isn't prepared. We should be teaching more about new technology in school.

[Stuart Ciske]

2.

It's not about teaching the new technology - it's about leveraging the new technology to teach the processes and skills and competencies they need to live in the new economy.

As Ken Kay, President of the 21st Century Partnership said earlier in the week at SETDA, " It's hard to measure 21st centuiry skills using 60 year old metrics."