Bud the Teacher

    Sometime in the next six months, Longmont, the city where I teach, will be rolling out a city-wide wireless network.  Some of my students have their own, WiFi equipped, laptop computers.  Not many, but some.
    Uh oh.
    Can you imagine what’s about to happen?  The storm that’s going to be coming? The only way to keep out unfiltered bandwidth would be to ban all devices that aren’t school network devices.  I don’t see that being a viable solution at all — students bringing their own computers improves access for everyone. 
    The world is coming into our classrooms.   It’s scary, disruptive, messy, engaging, beautiful, offensive, ugly, nice, mean, upset, upside down, and a whole lot else.  Time for us to deal with it rather than try to hide behind a blanket.

    My superintendent was honored yesterday by the Colorado Association of School Executives as the Colorado Superintendent of the Year.  Very cool.  I respect him very much, and feel he’s the right guy to win this award.
    I was pleasantly surprised, too, to see that my local newspaper has begun to embed video on its site.  Neat development.

    I forgot just how easy it is to use a camera phone to send photos to Flickr.  It took me longer to enter in the e-mail address for my Flickr account than it did for the first, and unashamedly ugly, photo to upload.  Since I’ve set up the account to automatically add the "csuwp" tag to all photos that I’m sending, then my Flickr badge on the CSUWP blog  is also automagically updating. 
    Cool.  I continually forget how powerful these phones are getting. 

    Jay Mathews has an interesting request :

So I have asked Gardner to help me, and him, become more familiar
with this new opinion delivery system by joining me in a blog-judging
contest. I hope readers will e-mail me at mathewsj@washpost.com and Gardner at walt.gard@verizon.net
the links to their favorite education blogs — no more than five per
reader, please, and I would love you to rank them in your order of
preference. Gardner and I will look them over and reveal our favorites
in a future column. He and I have different views on some key issues
and different tastes in writing styles, so entries should not be at any
disadvantage no matter what their slant or tone.

In other words, help drag two old guys into the 21st century, where I hear there is much to learn.

Please read the column — there’s a delightful story there — and then send Matthews your suggestions.    Thanks to Stephen for the link. 

The 2006 Edublog Awards are now open for nominations.  If you’re into such things, go ahead and send in a nomination or two.