Bloggerific v. DOPA

I had a bloggerific day the other day. A reading class (seriously, it is a class where they just read and read and read - mostly whatever they want. On Thursdays the teacher brings them in to read magazines and newspapers, sometimes they need something non-fiction, and there are all sorts of options for assessment - I love this class) stopped by to read and use the computers to blog about what they were reading. I had already introduced this class to the blog, so that was out of the way and many happily, easily blogged. For others, there was a lot of tech support. You need an email address to be invited to be a contributor of our blog - more than a couple kids didn't have email addresses (?! - we are a mostly wealthy, white district - mostly very connected at home - this surprised me, though a few explained they just use MySpace to communicate with friends - a very teachable moment in both directions). There were kids that kept clicking on the 'create a blog' button v. the 'create a post button.' And so on.

Overall, though, the kids wrote about their books, checked previous posts for comments, read other people's posts, and then went back to reading. It was awesome to read their posts, to see them read the other posts and then be interested in the book the other student-blogger recommended (peer reader advisory!), and to generally interact with the blog in terms of the content, not the delivery.

And then I got home and read about DOPA. Something that blindly would put a kabosh on all this good learning - tech learning, peer learning/teaching, personalized, independently paced, individualized learning, learning relevant to the real(virtual) world- all of which are apparently the big education buzz words and things we are supposed to be emphasizing and doing more of.

Punch in the gut.

Except it isn't any sort of done-deal yet, in fact it is barely off the ground. Action, people, action.