Wow! Your post has almost reduced me to tears. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts as you have. You see, I work with teachers. Many of them do not value the role of blogs as a learning tool. They will use books without question but blogs – Heck No!! The problem for most I dare to say is that they are not bloggers themselves. They have not experienced the power of being connected, actively involved, confident collaborators who use online tools to connect to a real audience, who write for a real purpose and gain feedback from the global network they are connected to. So how do we get them to see this? How do we shift then into the 21st C?

At the moment one school principal has prescribed that classes have to have a blog or wiki. His reasoning for this is that parents need to connect with the classrooms. Most parents work and so don’t get in during school hours. While this is an admirable reason it does not go far enough. It says nothing about the power of the blog as a tool to advance the students learning and connectedness. It says nothing about the value of a blog over a book, the later being an increasingly outdated tool in which students are pulled into, expected to write in and which noone else sees, and which at the end of the day goes into a dark cubbyhole, alone unopened, unread and where there is no-one to respond.

Thank you too for the opportunity to respond. At least I feel that someone may hear my concerns and understand what I am saying – especially as they don’t seem to have heard them so far in the world that I work in.

Juggling was also pretty fun (but hard)… I missed what happened to Michael and Brayden though because I wasn’t looking at the moment…

An RSS feed is a way to subscribe to somethingy. It is that orange box thingy with a dot and then 2 lines after it. I’m not sure how it works though =O

By the way, if you are getting the RSS comments from a guy named Christian Louboutin, mark them as spam (if you click on his avatar it brings you to a site that sells shoes). Most of my new classmates have gotten that comment, and I have gotten it too even though my blog has as RSS subscription feed.