This website is dedicated to helping the 21st century learner develop and hone 21st century skills. Once you reach the page, there are many different avenues to take and they are all dedicated to teaching users skills to help them develop their information fluency (others call it information literacy). They have a search button right at the top of the page which is useful if you have a specific skill or area you are wanting to learn about or you can browse the first page which has some of the most popular and most widely used skills. Teachers and students should visit this website if they are unfamiliar with certain skills or hoping to increase existing skills.
Teachers can access tools that serve to assist students in locating, evaluating and citing information. There are also games for students that will teach students to be better at finding and evaluating large amounts of information. The feature that I find the most useful for teachers is the tutorials for middle and high school students. These are self-paced tutorials and there is an opportunity for teachers and schools to purchase more comprehensive packages.
On the website there are also links for online learning classes, scholarly articles and blogs. A lot of the articles I browsed cover current issues that many people in our school systems are facing and things we may face as we enter the teaching profession. This is a nice way to connect teachers. I stumbled onto this feature by just “playing” with the website. I am sure that there is lots more to see and with more time I am sure I could learn more than enough about 21st century information than I hope I will ever need to use.
It was hard to find out how others are benefiting from this website because I could not find reviews on it. I did stumble across one review that gave a good background of the website and how it was started and funded. This review also mentioned that the website was developed using the National Education Technology Standards, the American Association of School Libraries Information Power Standards, and the Illinois Learning Standards. This is a really awesome website and I hope that as teachers if you need help understanding a technological concept this is your first stop.
Laura, this site sounds really beneficial, especially with being able to go to the skills page and either learn more about a specific skill, or see if there's one a high school student hasn't thought of but would be interested in.
ReplyDeleteYour review has peeked my interest and I'd like to visit the site, but think I've missed its location; can you remind me? It's probably sitting there in plain sight and I just don't see it. Thanks!~
Here is the site; http://21cif.com/. It does look to be very useful. I saved it to my favorites but need to put it with my delicious account too.
ReplyDeleteWhat fun this site is! Language Arts is not my strong suit but I found myself caught up in learning about my favorite "nyms" at this link: http://21cif.com/tutorials/micro/mm/usingnyms/page4.htm
I am hoping to learn how to put in all the little videos and sound bites so hopefully there will be some tutorials for that type of work.
Thanks!
This does look like a very good resource for helping teachers and students alike to hone their information fluency skills. I especially liked the part of the website that gives Internet Search Challenges so that you can practice your search and evaluation skills. I think this would be a good tool for encouraging students to more closely evaluate information using their information fluency model. Great site and review, thanks!
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