Computer skills are in demand and teachers who integrate reading and writing skills into lessons that incorporate computers are guaranteed to engage students.The George Lucas Foundation has been promoting technology skills for several years and has one of the best repositories of resources for project based learning on the Web. It also has the best ideas for how to incorporate project-based learning into the curriculum.

Students who learn Adobe's Creative Suite will have valuable job skills that are in demand.They learn InDesign for page layout, PhotoShop for image editing, Illustrator for graphics, Dream Weaver for Web design, and Acrobat for creating PDFs.Students at Palo Alto High School learn these layout and photo editing skills in the journalism program while simultaneously learning how to write well and how to work in teams.Journalism at Palo Alto High has been a highly successful program with hundreds of students involved. The class provides UC elective credit for Beginning Journalism and for Advanced Journalism but students take it more for the combination of real world skills and team work.Students love the program because they are given real world responsibilities and learn valuable "real world" skills.

While learning journalistic writing styles is a great way to get students excited about writing, many parents and teachers today favor a classical education so the question is how to give students both a classic education and 21st century skills.One way is to build Internet skills and technical skills into the traditional class.For example, in my freshman English class for next fall, students will be learning how to use Google Docs, how to blog, and how to search the Web as part of their regular English instruction. When I teach Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front,I will be teaching students to look for current events that relate to WWI using the Internet.When they write their essays on Google Docs, they will learn to collaborate effectively as part of a learning community.This gives students 21st century technical skills as well as English language writing skills.Students will also be collaborating on a WWI presentation which they can also do from home with Google Presentation.If teachers want to create a printable newsletter, they can use Apple's Pages, an easy-to-use word processing and layout program included in Apple's iWork software. And it is only $99.My freshman will be writing typical five-paragraph essays plus a variety of journalistic writing styles including news, features, and reviews so that they can diversify their writing skills and become self assured writers.

Some of the other books I will teach in the course include Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.Students will do background research on the authors using the Web and then they will present this information to their group thus giving them public speaking practice. They will blog about the books in groups of three or four, with each student contributing to the blog on a different day of the week.I find that blogging motivates students to improve their writing because they are concerned about the audience. These are just a few examples of ways to make a 20th century classroom into an exciting 21st century classroom.