Classroom backchannels

Image from Cirne

Cool Cat Teacher is installing a backchannel in her classroom. I love this. They don't even do this at most of the conferences I go to. But it is an amazing tool for people who are more comfortable with writing than speaking, and an amazing tool for referring back to after the class, or session, or seminar is finished. I'm not quite clear on whether this teacher is a private school teacher or not; if so, her ability to set something like this up is not as surprising. Still, if I understand it correctly, she's using a projector somewhere in the room to display the backchannel, and the implementation is done using just a private chat room on a public chat room server. What would it take to do this in a public school? The same as this teacher: a projector, a wall, and access to a chat server. And, the ability for the students to add chats from their desks. It gets a bit tricky right about there. Maybe at a New Technology High School they can do this, or maybe in a few years they'll get together one of those deals where every student has a laptop. Maybe. But there is one room at my son's school where they could do this: the brand new computer lab, and the room has a projector. I wonder what sorts of classes they teach in there?

Fundraising

So here's the deal: in order to get the school library some new books, we parents are supposed to participate in a fundraiser. We've been given a couple of catalogs of items that we're supposed to buy or talk our friends, grandparents, parents' coworkers, or other folks into buying in order to raise money for the library. The school is using a company called Paragon Promotions out of Evansville to handle the catalogs, write letters to parents, print the order forms, collect the money, etc. Presumably, after the merchandise is paid for and Paragon gets their cut, they'll send a check on over to the school and they'll be able to buy the books.

I want to get the school some books. As part of the construction this year, there is a new library room, and presumably there'll be space for a lot of new books.

But does this fundraising plan raise as many questions in your mind as it does in mine?

• What percentage of the money actually goes to library books?
• How much is Paragon's cut?
• Is every school doing this at the same time? How many kids are doing these fundraisers?
• How much is in the library fund now? What percentage of the school's overall budget goes to it?
• What books are they going to buy? What books do they have now?
• Can I just donate directly to the library fund? I sure don't want to mess around with this "cold call sales" thing.
• Can I just donate books directly to the library?

Of course, when a big library buys books it gets these extra-strength bindings so the books can be read hundreds of times. But even our very nice city library has some ordinary paperbacks that I'm guessing people have donated to them. What the heck? Lend 'em out a dozen times and toss 'em, or even sell them in a book sale if they're not in too bad shape. No harm, no foul. But even if there's some arcane regulation against doing this, I need to know a lot more about the school finances so I can help out their library and book buying like I want to.

And so, the adventure begins

My five-year-old just got the official letter in the mail: they ran a lottery and we now have the privilege of forking over $1800 to the public school system to send him to full-day kindergarten.

Is it worth it? I'm very ambivalent. Check out my post here to get some idea of why. But you know, I still thought it would be a good idea to get some sort of a dialog going. Now, I didn't have huge expectations of what the school web site would be like; as a matter of fact it might even have been a little better than I was expecting. So I dropped a note to the webmaster, a librarian at the school, and gave him a couple of suggestions for what I'd like to see: first, user comments on the site, and second, teacher biographies. I still feel like I have no idea of what goes on in this big, mysterious building that I am expected to send my only child to for most of the next seven years of his life.

The webmaster wrote back a very nice letter, but firmly rejected both of my suggestions, giving the typical reasons I've come to expect anytime I ask for a dialog: no time to monitor the comments, teachers might not want that information published, that sort of thing. Certainly I wouldn't want anything published about the teachers that they wouldn't want published, but there's certainly no shortage of teachers out there that have bios, websites, and all sorts of ways to communicate better with parents. Why not ask them? It's not like I'm asking for a webcam in the classroom. Yet.

So, let's start a dialog right here. What do you think about your public school? What are they doing right? How could they do better? How's the communication? Do you really have a good parent-teacher relationship? I want to hear from you.