October
Consider this: Most, if not all of your current students, will have multiple careers over the course of their lives and those careers will require life skills and learning skills in addition to core knowledge in specific subject areas. Their personal lives will also require those same skills. How can you help your students gain the personal skills they'll need, in addition to all the other skills and concepts you need to teach?

netTrekker d.i. addressess this concern with its new 21st Century Skills Channel. We've gathered 21st Century Skill resources, many of which existed in other appropriate places throughout netTrekker d.i., and put them in a central place to make them easy to find and use. Start this month, perhaps, by considering how you might deliberately teach life skills like leadership and responsibility. Your very presence in the classroom teaches these skills by example but the Life Skills section of the 21st Century Skills Channel will help you find ways to build these concepts into your lessons and assess your students' growth.


November
Did you know that students you teach who are 16 or younger this year have always lived in a world with open access to the internet? They (and we) are confronted with an information explosion which promises to keep expanding. The internet and Web 2.0 tools make it simple for anyone to publish anything for the whole world to see at the click of a mouse. How good are your students at sifting through the wealth of information available and choosing the few pieces which are not only reliable but also relevant to their needs?

Obviously, netTrekker d.i. is an excellent place to begin the search by providing links only to sites which are reliable and educator-evaluated. Students still need to choose among the many sites they might find, even in netTrekker d.i., for the ones which are relevant to THEIR needs. They also need to know how to evaluate the reliability of sites they find outside netTrekker d.i. The 21st Century Skill Channel in netTrekker d.i. has a collection of sites that will help your students learn the skills of information literacy, ranging from evaluating reliability and relevance of websites to learning about plagiarism and how to avoid it. Just click on the ICT Literacy branch of the 21st Century Skills Channel to find ideas for helping your students develop these skills which will help them in your class and throughout their lives.