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Each week for the past couple of years, Joann and I have discussed how teachers can use resources from the Gateway to 21st Century Skills to successfully integrate a huge variety of topics into their classrooms. I have learned so much by researching and discovering new ways to incorporate different types of resources into classrooms throughout the world. Since Gateway resources are aligned to standards, teachers are able to easily fit the ones they want to use into the framework of their particular required standards.

In my last column, I gave a brief overview of our Achievement Standards Network, or the ASN. The ASN is a vast (and ever-growing) repository of educational and professional standards that are described using rich metadata. The ASN uses concept terms with controlled vocabularies in order to maintain accuracy and consistency, and brings a host of other advantages for researchers and developers. That’s all fine and dandy (and it really is – believe me!) but let’s cut to the chase: How does using the ASN benefit educators and librarians who just really want to locate relevant academic standards quickly and efficiently?

We are teachers. We are in charge of making sure that students in our little corner of the world learn everything they need to know in our grade, our subject, or our specialty. It’s an art that can take years to perfect. The constantly changing standards, tests, infrastructure, and policies in the education world can further complicate the process. The new direction of my monthly column will take us on a journey to make sense of the best way to use open-source resources and free technology to support planning and teaching based on standards.

In the mid-1990s, standards-based education in the U.S. was enacted under the Clinton administration, and further refined under President George W. Bush. The legislation sought to improve American student performance by instituting more rigorous testing, and by holding schools accountable for student performance on these tests. However, since each state had its own process for creating and implementing educational standards, the content that students were expected to learn in one state was sometimes vastly different from the expectations in another state.

Many students came back from Thanksgiving break fresh from a long weekend with NO HOMEWORK! Phew…they got away with not thinking about math for the entire weekend…or did they? As they slide back into their school routine, you may want to discuss where math might have snuck into their Thanksgiving break. Were any of them helping in the kitchen? They were probably working with ratios, proportions, and multiplication without even knowing it. Were they fighting over the last pieces of pumpkin pie? It was the study of fractions at work! Bringing these instances of “real-world” math to students’ attention can help them realize the prevalence of math in their everyday lives (and the importance of math when creating a tasty meal).

Students sometimes wonder when they’ll use certain information that they learn in school. They may not reap immediate benefits from reading Herman Melville or learning the laws of stoichiometry, but they usually take the teachers at their word that such knowledge is never wasted – it’s all part of the process of becoming educated citizens. In math, however, the benefits of learning ratio and proportion are instantly recognizable. People use ratios every day in all sorts of situations, and are often even unaware that they’re doing so. Ratio and proportion are so prevalent in daily life that their use has become reflexive.

Throughout the changes in education over the years, one goal has remained constant: children must learn to read. It’s a crucial skill for success in every other subject and ultimately, success in life. There is such a focus on the best methods for teaching kids to read; the importance of encouraging the love of reading is often blurred. Students might learn to successfully decode words and read, but they won’t make a habit of reading for pleasure unless they enjoy it.

In 2007, a report on the state of reading in the U.S. was published by the National Endowment for the Arts. The study found that, not only were Americans reading less, but that reading comprehension skills were also steadily eroding. The findings for students were also troubling: more than 50% of college students engaged in little or no pleasure reading, and less than a third of 13 year-olds read daily. The report concluded that the decline in reading was likely to result in grave economic, social, cultural, and civic consequences.