Learning to Change and Changing to Learn

Good morning! Today I am going to start a week of training on 21st Century Skills in the classroom. After arriving in Sioux Falls, I found the Eastern Dakota Educational Cooperative and was happy to see a group of 35 teachers, four representatives from the Department of Education, and many representatives from ESA 2. I am excited to look into integrating more of the 21st Century Skills into my curriculum. Wade Pogany from the DOE was here and let us know that the beginnings of this week actually began a few years ago after talking with a group of educators from West Virginia. This group actually started out the push to make the educators more tech savvy and aware of the changing ability pool and the changing needs of the business world today. I think this is a good push and I hope that this week will help inspire other teachers to think the same.

On a side note, at some point, I will describe my collaborative unit to make term papers not so difficult and more relevant to high school graduates. It has worked well in the past, but I cannot wait to change it again for next year to make it better. 

We began today with fun introductions and setting up a board of new technologies that all of us would like to learn in the future (if not this week). And we were then shown a video that helps us to understand what we are going to do this week. I posted it below to share with you.