I have written this following the rules written in bold:

TJ Shay’s rules are: “List FIVE changes you would like to see in the educational system. Your responses should represent your perspective and your passion for learning and students…tag the following people…from a variety of perspectives. If you have been tagged, tag as many people as you choose, but try for a variety.”

1. To quote Ryan Bretag, “Leaders <should> tap the shoulders of professionals in the classroom to give them a greater responsibility and a stronger voice to encourage the personalization of learning opportunities designed as a community.

2. School Boards, Administrators-all policy makers and enforcers- must get over the ‘fear’ of digital tools that they manifest and foster. Blocking pornography, conforming to CIPA for Federal funding, should be the extent of the policy for filtering in schools. They have not banned writing implements for what is scribbled in the restrooms, so why do they do what they do to access to technology?

3. Collaboration should blossom face-to-face the way it has in PLNs. Don’t sit in Teachers’ Room and complain, collaborate in research and reporting to make things happen, to make things change.

4. Schools should be open seven days a week. As I said in an earlier post the only places more underused than schools are churches. When fuel prices skyrocketed last year, the first thing you heard from managers was that schools might go to four-day schedules. My gut feeling was antithetical to that – the only way that is a saving is in travel dollars. The extra hardships of childcare and sitting in under-heated houses and apartments, while the school environments are maintained, are unconscionable.

5. Individualize education plans and group students by needs and desires rather than by credits earned and courses completed.

I tag these colleagues from Plurk:

Char Young @charyoung – Homeschool educator and tutor
John Martin @edventures – Technology architect in higher ed
Scott Carter @scarter – ex-Biology teacher, ex-principal, and now a superintendent
Elizabeth Koh @elizabethkoh – Doctoral candidate and teaching ass’t at the National University of Singapore
Kobus van Wyck @kobus – Director of Khanya Program-providing ICT services to disadvantaged schools in South Africa

1. I tried four times to write novels. I was able to get up to 173 pages of the first draft on one of them.

2. I started college as a biology major.

3. I was a widower when Jan and were married.

4. I am the oldest of nine children: six boys and three girls. I am 18 years older than my youngest sib and 17 years younger than my mom.

5. I have been in one labor union or another for thirty years.

6. My favorite color is green. (I am relieved not to start one of these with ‘I’.)

7. I was a semi-pro first baseman for a while.

I’m tagging:

@amycordova

@jjohnson

@kmulford

@kcaise

@kobus

@skytrystsjoy

@beil