Rant Time.

I would really like to share today’s post from Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog with my faculty. But I can’t. Bess – our ever present watchdog…errr…content filter won’t let me. So I plan to email Doug for permission to copy/paste his post to our staff and administration. What a shame that I have to do this.

In the post, Doug builds on John Pederson’s blog post. John and Doug present a challenge – learning with a laptop and learning with only traditional classroom tools. It really paints a picture of what many of us deal with every day – and it is a very sad picture.

Here we are asking our students to abandon their tech tools at the door, in exchange for a chisel and stone tablets – or an abacus if they are lucky. I know I am getting old – but every day I feel more like Wilma Flintstone – trying to get from here to there in my “dinomobile”.

How have we let this happen? How can we change things? Yes – money is often a big part of the problem. It sure is here in Gananda. But sometimes it is just the “rules” getting in the way – or it’s the content filter. I am on our School Improvement Team. Hopefully we can work through some of our local school issues. But filtering is beyond our control. I believe that our BOCES is discussing this and other related topics. I hope these discussions will lead to some good decisions. I believe our School Library System Director will be part of the talks, so libraries will have some representation.