We have a geothermal heating and cooling system (which really just translates to me as: AIR CONDITIONING!), Green friendly materials, and technology out the wazoo.
Each classroom is equipped with a SmartBoard, which is a schmancy interactive white board, a wireless microphone system to save a weary teacher's voice, and high end sound systems. Our school has wireless internet capabilities, and even makes my bed in the morning. I wish!
An additional upgrade the school board made was our internet filtering system. Our previous filter, called Bess (whose logo was a female dog, and was more often called Bitch, than Bess), was a battle ax. Nobody could get to anything on her -- or at least anything remotely educational that would help to integrate new technologies. We couldn't get on blogs (or have our kids get on blogs for research), we couldn't look up images of anything (!), and we couldn't use youtube.
While most teacher would probably just use youtube to look of videos of toddlers doing the Stanky Leg, the rest of us would use it for educational purposes, like finding obscure Roald Dahl short stories that were turned into Alfred Hitchcock Presents shorts, like-a this-a one, here.
We can also get on to facebook, which seems absurd!
The problem is now, I can't google anything! Everything that is interesting to me, or useful is blocked by our new filter! I was googling some information on a few of the short stories I was to teach in the near future ("The Lottery," "Lamb to the Slaughter," "Man from the South") and they were all blocked, blocked, blocked. What gives?!
Never did I think I would asking for Bess back, but she seems like the better deal in this equation!
As a side note, this is was of my favorite conversations this week in class:
Scene: Short Fiction class, a senior elective
Me: Today we're going to read a short story called "Man from the South"
Kid in back of class to friend: Why are we always reading short stories!?!
America's future, folks!
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