And now, for something completely different...

I staked out the cyberspace for this blog some 7 months ago, and have done almost nothing with it. I thought I would use it as a way to connect to students through the Internet, but that hasn't happened. First, other tools exist for doing this: in Moodle, I can password-protect copyrighted material, and keep myself safe under fair-use law. I can make a MySpace or Facebook account and connect a lot more directly to most of my students. I can Twitter reminders to most of them, and have the reminders show up on their phones--in some cases, during my actual class. (I've always wanted to text to one of my students, "Stp txt in cls.")

Also, since spring break, I've thought a great deal about the way my class is set up, the way it should be set up, etc., and I've done heaps of research about classroom management and school behavior and language education methodology. I'm finding my old notebook system insufficient for keeping it all in order. This, of course, means I can't find anything.

So, as of today, I'm going to completely change the theme. It's no longer related to the classroom, and will be much more geared towards looking at how to make schools, specifically MY school, work better. Since it helps to start off with a statement of goals (a constant theme in the research), I'll list mine here. My goals with this blog are to: 1.) organize my sources and informal thinking process about school into a searchable form, so I can find ideas after I have them; 2.) receive commentary from anyone who's ever participated in a class, particularly in a language class; 3.) make the process of thinking about schools more of a process, instead of something I do in the margins of my notebooks, next to doodles of me in revolucionario outfits.

I'll start off later with a running description of what I'm working on at the moment. My readership right now consists of 0--my wife doesn't read my blog--so at first it will be a sort of electronic spiral notebook. But I hope to encourage others to read, and more important, comment on the posts later, so the tone will grow more interactive in the weeks to come.