Opening classrooms

Scott Elias wrote an article on how classrooms are isolated from public scrutiny, and commented that administrators need to be up and walking around in order to minimize this. When I read it, I just had to ask how classrooms can become more open to the outsiders who have the largest stake in what is going on in the classroom - the parents. He had some good ideas involving using the web to track assignments using prepackaged software, perhaps like Moodle, or blogs, vlogs, wikis, to allow parents to log in and really see what is going on in the classroom. That's a great goal, but I'm not sure how we get from here to there. Do we rely on the individual classroom teachers to create their own blogs? Does the school district administration have to decree that this be done? Do the administrators of the individual schools have a say? I'm not sure.

I've lost the link now, but I remember reading an article about a teacher who had to stop blogging because an adminstrator disapproved. As long as we have that kind of attitude in the school system, we're not going to have any change, that's for sure.