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I now have blogs at [|edublogs.org] and [|blogspot.com] (belongs to Google) and [|wordpress.com]


 * ="You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”= ||
 * [[image:http://thinkexist.com/i/sq/as5.gif width="11" height="9" align="middle"]] [|Winston Churchill] ||

“[|We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out]” [|Winston Churchill] [|I have never been hurt by what I have not said. Calvin Coolidge]

This space can have much less formal rules than my [|"Staple It To The World"] publishing sites. I'm certainly not saying that there will be no rules at all--I don't want to see the kind of text message abbreviations that stink up teenspeak. I won't tolerate any language that is inappropriate for school use, either. However, reasonably age-appropriate spelling and grammar might be OK, to encourage students to take some risks in informal discussions. Limiting a kid to using only the words s/he can absolutely guarantee s/he can spell accurately tends to lead to BORRRRRRRRing writing!

Of my three current schools, only the poorest has a computer lab! The more wealthy/middle class schools both have disbanded their labs in the last two years. I wish I could say that the dissolution/dispersion of the labs happened in order to integrate technology more directly into the classrooms, but I don't believe that is the case. The former lab computers were taken out of use (out of the building) rather than taken from a lab back into the classrooms. One school probably reduced the number of computers in the building by at least 40, removing grade-level labs as well as the schoolwide lab, and eliminating the funding for a full-time computer teacher. Another removed a half-class-sized lab from the library, and converted that space into a Kindergarten classroom. Those computers are now jumbled into a dead storage room in the basement, awaiting being hauled off into oblivion.

On the plus side, this school did (lease) obtain a cartload (30) of wireless-enabled laptops (for all practical purposes, these are available only in the grades 3-5 classrooms, and are used only by a very few of those teachers for very limited projects.

I'm starting up Gaggle.net user projects at my two less-affluent schools. What I hope to accomplish is to expand the use of computers as writing/communication tools by bypassing the need to save material on a local hard drive. If I can train students and their classroom teachers to make use of digital lockers (each paid Gaggle user is allocated 100 MB!) then it won't matter which computer any student or teacher uses, their work-in-progress can be accessed/extended from anywhere!