Evaluating 21st Century Skills

I am fairly familiar with the Partnership for 21st Century Skills website. Over the past year my school has been incorporating there list of skills deemed necessary to succeed in the 21st century. When I think of 21st century skills, I often think of technolgy, media, etc. however, when viewing the website I was surprised to see how such skills really should be integrated into the entire school foundation. For example, the skills should be used as an avenue to teach core subjects not isolated experiences. This is evident in the viewing of the framework for 21st century learning graphic.

I find it difficult to disagree with anything on the site. During our professional development we were asked to demonstrate how we currently address each of these skills in our classrooms. At the end of the day every teacher was able to provide multiple examples of how these skills are currently being implemented in our lessons. This only reinforces the importance of the work that this organization represents.

While I understand the importance of these skills, my students may not understand there relevance necessarily. I need to enforce the importance of these skills in a quickly changing technological age in order to produce students who are independent self-directed learners.

Help with TI-nspire

Recently my district purchased ten TI-nspire graphing calculators. I attended a workshop on how to use these calculators, which was beneficial in learning how to navigate the features of the calculator itself. The Texas Instruments website offers many wonderful activities that I cannot make use of due to an inability to download them. We have contacted Texas Instruments directly for training (to no avail), and purchased the TI-nspire for Dummies book. I am not sure what I am doing wrong, so I am looking to converse with anyone who can offer some input that will allow me to utilize the TI-nspire in an innovative way in my classroom.