Alabama Best Practices Center 21st Century Learning Wiki is a space for educators to contribute and access resources to support 21st century learning. Emerging educational themes on the wiki include project-based learning, gaming in education, and teacher 2.0 resources.

The Alabama Best Practices Center designed a two-year professional development program that engages educators from participating schools in conversations about 21st Century Learning. In 2005, with support from Microsoft, ABPC recruited small teams from 20 forward thinking schools across the state and established a virtual learning community built around an online curriculum called, "Keeping Up with the Net Generation."

Twenty more schools were selected to participate for the 2006-07 school year. Schools that had begun working the previous year continued their professional development in an "advanced strand" of the project.

The project is supported by 10 Alabama educators who have been selected and trained to be ABPC's "21st Century Teacher Fellows." The project's leadership includes staff from the Alabama Best Practices Center and two consultants who are experts in 21st Century Learning and virtual professional communities.

On the front page, this tool for participating schools welcomes anybody else who finds it useful. It's definitely worth scrolling down the entire sidebar to begin an exploration. Resources are abundant.

The page for the "21^st Century Learners Project, Talladega County Schools Proposal," for example, offers their timeline for professional development in 21^st Century skills and the related budget. "Alabama Best Practices Center's 21^st Century Learners project has made a huge impact on two Talladega County schools, Winterboro and Fayetteville," explains this page. These schools have experienced:

• Increase in student engagement
• Increase of student mastery of 21^st Century skills: collaboration, problem-based learning, technology skills, communication skills, etc.
• Collaboration with and support from teachers from other schools to solve problems, to address student learning obstacles, to build professional learning communities
• Shift in teacher attitudes and expectations of professional development opportunities
• Recognition for professional development efforts in 21^st Century learning serves as a motivation for continuing improvement

Kindly, they offer their training plan to help others have the same experience.

A web 2.0 link offers Alabama participants a look at the tools they will be learning to use, but the rest of us get a remarkable list of software for digital storytelling, book-making, podcasting, quiz-making, collaborative writing, avatar creation, and the list goes on.

A presentation on "gaming in education" by Mark Wagner is available if you download elluminate software, and Alabama wiki writers kindly supply a link.

There are handouts, technical lessons, samples of student work and more. This wiki is no quickie, but dive in anyway.

Sources: Alabama Best Practices Center, 21^st Century Learning Project
The ABPC wiki: our information warehouse for all things 21st Century
Partnership for 21^st Century Skills, Resources for 21^st Skills Database