For the past several years, my school has sponsored wonderful assemblies and meetings featuring professors and physicians from Stanford about teenagers and sleep. They may be summed up as follows:

• teens are wired for different sleep patterns than adults or young children.
• teens don’t get enough sleep.
• sleep deprivation contributes to poor academic performance, mental and physical health problems, and student stress.

A few schools, including my own, have begun to experiment with starting school later in the day. The major problem seems to always come down to after school activities such as plays, clubs, and athletics, especially athletics. Athletics, with its dependencies on other schools for competition, seems to be the deal breaker – unless you can get all of the other schools in your area to affect a similar change. This has about as much chance as happening as members of our two political parties in congress agreeing on, well, anything.

But as Professor Smith in Lost in Space used to say: “Never fear, Smith is here.” (Note: substitute “Taffee” for “Smith.”)

All we need to do is throw-off the agrarian, nine month calendar that was foisted upon schools by well-meaning legislators; a calendar created chiefly to allow children time-off in the summer to work the family farm. Later, tourist bureaus chimed in with their support for summer vacation-friendly schedules which permit families to book  resorts, buy trinkets in souvenir shops, purchase boats, jet skis, and endless summers. As a kid growing up in Michigan, school always started after Labor Day to give the resort owners one last economic shot in the arm before the autumn doldrums.

The idea of year-round education is not new. Indeed some schools have been doing it for years. There’s even an association devoted to the cause.

There are compelling economic reasons to consider year-round education. Some year-round education schedules enable schools to service more students within the same physical structure, about 25% more. This makes a great deal of sense when schools are hurting for money and facilities are  cramped.

There are compelling academic reasons as well. Many teachers complain about the amount of re-teaching they must do each fall to address the knowledge and skills forgotten by students after a three month hiatus. Heck, I sometimes forget things in three minutes!

But my reason for thinking about year round school is mainly to address two stubborn problems that face all middle and upper schools:

1. student fatigue, and
2. lack of time for faculty professional development.

The typical 180 student contact days per year, with six instructional hours per day, computes to 1080 hours of instruction per year.

Now imagine a school day of five instructional hours per day. To get to 1080 instructional hours, we’d need to 216 days, or 36 additional days per year. (Note: there’s also nothing magic about 1080 hours of instruction per year.)

In my mind’s eye, we would strategically position three, four, even five day weekends for student time-off throughout the year, as well as traditional seasonal breaks. Students would have classes in each month of the year, and not simply add time to June and August, with all of July off.

Now, factor in faculty professional development, potentially twenty five extra days of faculty development per year! Getting excited yet?

Teachers, those long-suffering professionals who never find themselves quite in the same league as physicians, attorneys, scientist, architects, and the like; those same people who have to deal with the smart alecks at parties who “envy” them having their summers off, who think that teachers have it “easy,” such teachers might finally find parity with other professionals. Need a vacation? Take time off. Thinks the kids will go to hell in a hand basket without you? Believe me, the kids will be okay.

Yes, twelve month contracts will cost schools more money. This is not the “save money” model of year-round education. This is the “let’s get real about time” model of year-round education. And independent schools may be the only ones with the resources and innovative spirit to lead the way.

21st century learning asks us to re-imagine schools and learning in order to better prepare children for their future, not out past. Why aren’t then we thinking about something as simple as how students schedule their time, or rather, how we structure their time for them? For the vast majority of students the future will not be one built on agrarian calendars. Their professional development will be on-going, not something crammed into summer months or hurried meetings. They may work from home, or they may work in an office. They may work swing shifts or “bankers hours.” They may work four day weeks, or seven days on and three days off. But you can bet that, unless they are educators caught in today’s system, they won’t have a schedule such as the one they had for twelve years of their lives as students.

And here’s a final thought. For seniors, so soon off to college or a gap year, why not experiment with letting them determine their own vacation schedules, just like the grown-ups we’re say we are helping them to become?

Am I on to something or full of it? Let me know.

Q. What do velcro, pine tar, and email have in common?

A. They are all sticky applications!

While I was working at Netscape (you remember them, don’t you? They helped Al Gore invent the Internet) we talked about Internet browsers and email as “sticky” applications. By this we meant a software program that people are loath to give up. They have invested time and energy into learning it, creating and maintaining their bookmarks or address books, and the software may even be associated with a particular Internet service provider with a non-portable email address. We tried to make such applications even stickier by adding more features to them and integrating them with other applications.

We used a less flattering analogy sometimes as well — “getting the needle in their arm” — to describe the addictive nature of certain applications that our “users” (ironic choice of words) found difficult to give up even when they knew there was a better way.

If I may, I’d like to suggest yet another analogy for sticky apps: boat anchors. And what brings this to my mind today is my school’s email messaging system, which shares many of the characteristics of a boat anchor:

• it provides a safe harbor for many users during a time when there’s a sea change happening in technology.
• like an anchor, email can slow the rate of change or acceleration in an organization; useful if one is about to crash upon the shoals.
• an anchor is a really simple machine; a chain and a heavy weight describes the essence of an anchor just as sending and receiving electronic messages describes the essence of an email system.

But even the heaviest of boat anchors are meant to be hauled up and moved with the ship when it’s time to move. When an anchor becomes permanent, it becomes a mooring. When software becomes permanent, it becomes a liability to learning and innovation.

Email software and its associated features (address books, calendars, chat, and so on) are moving from the desktop to the cloud. Special purpose applications are giving way to the web browser, which itself is often a gateway to not just displaying information but interacting with server software tuned for the computer or handheld device accessing the site. Email is blending with blogging, wikis, social networking, Twitter, SMS, podcasts, vodcasts, photo sharing, and voicemail. The electronic, text-based message is morphing into its next, but certainly not final, iteration. It has lost it’s stickiness as a stand-alone application by becoming more fully ingrained in everything we do. So in a way we are more firmly attached to email than we at Netscape could ever have imagined, even as we could not imagine Netscape in its current state as a high-noon shadow of it’s former self.

Out with clients, in with the cloud, and anchors aweigh!

Something has been sneaking up on this digital immigrant that I find both disturbing and fascinating.

As a teenager more years ago than I like to admit, I lived in the cleanest, neatest house in the world. It’s true. Those were the days of the mangle iron, where after line drying the wash, my mother would sit and iron. Everything. Even the sheets. Even my tidy whities. My mother’s cleaning prowess was mythic. She made up the saying, “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” You can look it up.

But teenagers are not always the neatest beings, and one day my mother and I clashed. While at age 95 she sometimes forgets what she said five minutes ago, she still recalls the time she moved something in my room and I exploded in adolescent rage at her intrusion into my space, and messing with my own form of organization. Where she saw chaos, I saw a system. I knew which pile held what.

Some years later I grew to appreciate the calming effect an organized home can provide. I extended that concept to my computer use. On my work and home computers, I maintain a complicated yet intuitive file folder structure for my documents, music, photos, and videos. I work diligently to keep my computer desktop and email application organized through filing, deleting, and file aliasing.

People who come to me for technical help often apologize for the state of their computer desktops, littered as they are with dozens, maybe even a hundred files all over the place. “I know I should clean this up,” they sheepishly admit. I secretly pity their lack of discipline and disorganization.

Enter today’s teenager. Messy desktops, nonexistent file structures.

And an entirely new way of finding what they need and launching applications that is often faster than my neatly structured, hierarchical approach.

Search.

More than once while working with a student I have suggested that they use another application. They look in their Mac’s dock,  and if it’s not there immediately Go to Spotlight, search, and launch. Applications folder? Fuggadaboutit!

Can’t find a document? Use Spotlight. Or use Google Desktop.

Folders are for sissies and neat freaks.

My inner teenager exults! My inner mom cringes.

Can this old dog learn new tricks?

Earlier this week my school was fortunate enough to have one of my sheroes on campus to speak to our student body and adult community, Gloria Steinem. (Yeah, that’s really her in the photo to the left. It was the best I could do from my iPhone at that distance.) I had last hear her speak some twenty-plus years ago when I was a college professor. Her conviction, if not her fire, is as strong as ever.

What struck me about Ms. Steinem’s remarks this time is how much she spoke of the negative effects sexism and patriarchy has had on men as well as women; that men have not been able to develop to their full potential, to develop as whole beings with both “masculine” and “feminine” characteristics. As a man and as a feminist, I could not agree more. And as a feminist, my ears perked up when she defined “feminist” as someone who believes in the equality of the sexes.

Later that evening, I wondered if there was such a word as “masculinist.” I’d never heard the word, but I took up my handy electronic dictionary, type it in, and voila!

masculinist n. an advocate of male superiority or dominance

Not quite the definition I had hoped for. So masculinists advocate the superiority of men, while feminists advocate for equal treatment of men and women.

<sigh>

I suppose there are women who are masculinists. (Phyllis Schlafy comes to mind.) But thankfully I think they are a dying breed.

I wish I could definitively say the same for men who are masculinists. I see hope, but it’s a distant hope. As a feminist, as an educator, and as a male I am awfully glad I work in a girls school.

In my last post, I wrote about greening a school’s operations, curriculum, and culture. A large part of greening a school is “voting with your money.” That is, you make decisions about what the school purchases with an eye towards purchasing the most environmentally sustainable products. This will likely mean changing habits, introducing people to different products, and in some cases, paying more. (But as more and more people make these choices, costs will decrease.)

Where to start? The following list, containing information gleaned from dozens of web sites and my school’s own green business audit, might provide a starting point. It is written in the form of a policy statement that may be easily adopted for your own school.

---

[School Name] Sustainable Goods and Services Purchasing Policy

Wherever practicable, [our school] will give preference to environmentally superior products and services, where quality, function, and cost are equal or superior.

All employees are encouraged to select products that comply with this procedure, unless the cost/benefit trade-off cannot be justified and documented on the purchase requisition.

Wherever practicable, [our school] will purchase materials that:

• minimize packaging,
• favor durable versus single use or disposable items,
• are recyclable or, if not recyclable, safely disposable,
• are made from raw materials that have been obtained in an environmentally sound, sustainable manner,
• are manufactured in an environmentally sound manner, and in factories which provide humane, fair, and sustainable working conditions,
• cause minimal or no environmental damage during normal use, maintenance, or disposal and
• meet the standards of the EPA’s Environmentally Preferable Purchasing (EPP) database or other appropriate green purchasing guidelines.

Wherever practicable, [our school] will purchase services:

• from organizations with a record of environmental sustainability,
• who use virtual consulting, training, and installation opportunities to minimize travel,
• who pay their employees a living wage and which provide humane, fair, and sustainable working conditions,
• and who minimize the use of paper in favor of electronic documents.

We will communicate this policy with our vendors and work with them to meet its criteria.

These policies will be reviewed annually by the school’s [insert committee or person responsible here] in consultation with the [whoever else you wish to name].

Janitorial and Gardening Supplies
Wherever practicable, we will

• use Green Seal certified janitorial supplies,
• use compost and natural, safe soil amendments in lieu of chemical fertilizers, and
• use an integrated pest management system will be used which favors the least toxic means of controlling pests.

Office Furniture and Carpeting
Wherever practicable, we will favor

• furniture and carpeting composed of recycled materials with low emissions of formaldehyde or VOCs,
• and which is designed to make recycling easier when it is no longer in use.

Painting and Building Repairs
Wherever practicable, we will

• use low voc paints, varnishes, and driveway coatings,use recycled paints, varnishes, and building materials,
• and properly re-use or recycle waste construction materials.

Vehicles and Landscaping Equipment
Wherever practicable, we will

• use alternative fuel, hybrid, or electric vehicles, and use alternative fuel, electric, or human powered landscaping equipment.

Copiers, Printers, Fax and Multifunctional, and Other Office Equipment
Wherever practicable, we will purchase office equipment that

• is Energy Star certified,
• has a two-side copying/printing function, with easily refilled or recycle printing cartridges,
• is easy to recycle or donate, and
• incorporates recycled parts and/or materials.

Servers, Computers, Monitors, Projection Devices, Televisions
Wherever practicable, we will purchase computer equipment that

• is Energy Star certified,
• can be upgraded for a longer useful life,
• use LCD rather than cathode-ray tube displays, and
• are designed to facilitate recycling and re-use of component parts.

Refrigerators, Freezers and other Large Appliances
Wherever practicable, we will purchase appliances that

• are Energy Star certified, and
• use non-CFC materials and refrigerants.

Light Bulbs and Lighting Equipment
Wherever practicable, we will

• replace incandescent lights with low-mercury, long-life fluorescent, LED, or other low energy alternatives,
• recycle bulbs and lamps or, if not recyclable, properly dispose of them,
• use lighting fixtures designed to facilitate dismantling and recycling,
• promote the use of natural lighting and light rooms to the optimal brightness for work and energy savings,
• utilize brightness sensors, human motion sensors, timer functions, and light adjustment functions, and
• appropriately combine localized and wide area lighting.

Disposable paper (facial or toilet tissue, paper towels, coffee filters)
Wherever practicable, we will purchase disposable paper products that

• contain a maximum blend of recycled paper,
• have low brightness or whiteness (no chlorine bleach),
• are single ply.

Paper for Office Machines
Wherever practicable, we will purchase office paper products that

• contain a maximum blend of recycled paper,
• have low brightness or whiteness (no chlorine bleach), and
• are easily recyclable (no coated papers).

Office Supplies (note pads, envelopes, labels, file folders, and other paper; transparencies; tape; pencils of all types; pens; markers; erasers; and correctional tools)
Wherever practicable, we will purchase office products that

• use a large percentage of recycled materials,
• use water-soluble adhesives, and
• contain no or low levels of VOCs.

Food, Snacks, and Dining
Wherever practicable, we will purchase food that

• is locally produced and organically grown,
• adheres to fair trade policies,
• minimizes packaging, and
• comes in recyclable/returnable containers.

Clothing and Uniforms
Wherever practicable, we will purchase garments that

• are made with organically grown natural materials and/or recycled materials,
• are made to be washed rather than dry cleaned, and
• resist staining, shrinking, fading, and other wear and tear.

Athletic Equipment and Supplies
Wherever practicable, we will purchase athletic equipment and supplies that

• are designed for long life,
• use non-toxic materials, and
• use recycled materials.

Science Classroom Equipment and Supplies
Wherever practicable, we will purchase science equipment and supplies that

• are designed for long life, and use recycled materials,
• are non-toxic and present no hazards for disposal or recycling.

Books
Wherever practicable, we will purchase books that

• are distributable in electronic format or, if printed
• are designed for long life, and
• use paper with at least 30% post-consumer recycled content.

---

Want to learn more about how going green can save you green? Listen to this NAIS podcast.

Several years ago, NAIS president Patrick Bassett described a wonderful “multidimensional definition of school sustainability,” including finances, curriculum, demographics, global networking, and the environment. This multidimensional definition of sustainability is an important and helpful model for thinking holistically about school’s sustainability, and I recommend it as a construct for such discussions.

Yet for many people the meaning of the term “sustainability” is still restricted to environmental sustainability in general, and global climate change in particular.

For years many schools have silently practiced aspects of environmental sustainability in the form of conservation’s three-r’s (reduce, re-use, recycle) and through environmental and outdoor education programs. But to many of us it is clear that we must do more than “pick the low hanging fruit” of energy and materials conservation, or mark Earth Day each April with special programs. Rather, we must make significant changes in how we operate our schools and teach our children if we are to truly reduce our environmental footprint and to help students adopt behaviors and attitudes consistent with a sustainable future.

Fortunately, there are many resources available to assist schools in reaching these goals, and many schools have or are creating programs that can be models for the rest of us to learn from and emulate. One such organization is the Green School Alliance, whose logo is depicted here, and I am proud to say that my school is a charter member.

Another useful construct for thinking about your school is to consider three aspects to green initiatives: greening your school’s operations, its curriculum, and its culture.

Greening School Operations

The problems associated with global climate change may seem overwhelming, and the contributions of each of our schools to solving them insignificant. It is imperative to guard against any feelings of helplessness that may occur as you learn more about these issues. (Righteous anger is justified, if it leads to righteous action.) It is especially critical to help students look to the future with a realistic sense of optimism. This is why it is useful to have programs that provide a means for students to take action, and I think that school operations represent the easiest place for this to first occur. Getting students involved in conducting audits of your waste and recycling stream, for example, can not only provide valuable information to the school but can be the springboard for wonderful curricular connections.

A more formal approach to addressing school operations exists in the form of “green business” certification programs, often sponsored by your local county or municipal government, to assist local businesses in assessing and improving their current environmental practices. For example, Castilleja School in Palo Alto, CA is turned to its Santa Clara County government for such a program. Not only was the program of no cost to to them, but it provided them with thousands of dollars worth of consulting assistance in such areas as solid waste reduction, recycling, composting, energy efficiency, toxic chemicals abatement, water use, landscaping, and food service. The goverment also provided to them, again at no cost, replacements for more efficient water and bathroom fixtures.

Greening the Curriculum

Many schools have faculty who are deeply committed environmentalists, and as such bring ideas about sustainability into their classroom in both informal and formal ways:

• Distributing handouts, collecting homework, and correcting student work electronically.
• Providing recharging stations for batteries used in student calculators and computers.
• Modeling conservation by turning off lights when leaving a room, printing on two sides of the page, re-using the blank back sides of printouts for scratch paper, and so on.
• Facilitating age-appropriate discussions of global climate change in their classrooms or advisories.
• Using opportunities to connect sustainability to their subject area, such as measuring and graphing the school’s power and water consumption, writing persuasive essays on environmental topics, reading the great works of fiction, poetry or essays with environmental themes, or expressing a love of the earth through photography, movie making, sculpture, painting and drawing, dance, and music.
• Engaging students in discussions about scarcity (something most children in the U.S. have little first hand experience with), social and environmental justice, and their own economic choices.
• Performing community service projects such as tree planting, coastal and waterways cleanup, creating and tending a school vegetable garden, or helping senior citizens replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.

Greening the School Culture

Creating a culture of sustainability is challenging, particularly if it has not been core to the school’s mission or habits. Indeed, environmental sustainability can appear to be at odds with other school values:

• Your Development office prides itself in the high quality of its print materials used to communicate with parents and donors. Moving to electronic means of communication may seem less personal, and printing on recycled paper using soy-based inks may be more costly.
• Your parent organization is responsible for a number of school events. Getting them to use ceramic plates and cups and cloth napkins instead of disposable paper products may mean more work for the volunteers.
• Your board of trustees may perceive purchasing carbon offset certificates for your utility use and travel as an unnecessary expense rather than as an investment in a clean future.
• Your school lunch program runs on a tight budget. Purchasing locally grown, organic food may be more costly, and using more seasonal fruits and vegetables may require changes in their menus and food preparation practices.
• Your student and athletic uniforms are a big part of your heritage and identity. Switching to fabrics that are organically grown may be difficult, and assuring that the workers in manufacturing plants where the uniforms are created are properly compensated and work in safe conditions may be difficult to validate.

Changes in school culture seldom occur quickly, and require buy-in from the community and persistence on the part of school leaders. Formalizing your goals for sustainability in documents such as the school’s long-range plan, regional or national accreditation goals, and the school mission statement are a means to demonstrate commitment and help to keep environmental sustainability in your community’s eye. Creating connections with other schools and universities, environmental groups, business organizations, media outlets, and local government can also provide you with resources to bolster your efforts to raise awareness, celebrate and publicize your successes, and learn about programs that can assist your efforts.

First Steps

Given the complexities involved in all of these issues it may be difficult to decide where to start. But this very complexity means that there is no “right” place to begin. Rather than getting mired in “analysis-paralysis,” simply start doing. Whether it’s water conservation, reducing landfill-bound waste, the use of environmentally friendly cleaners, pesticides, and herbicides, planting trees and native plants, purchasing carbon credits, creating “green teams” of faculty, staff, and students, or installing solar panels does not matter. These are all great projects and contribute to a sustainable future for your school and our planet. And with action comes hope, and with hope comes a new habit of mind that, ultimately, is the only way that we can save ourselves, and our planet.

It’s time for schools to re-examine their student cell phone policies.

Last year, the New York Times reported that a New York court affirmed the right of the Department of Education to ban (not restrict, not regulate, but ban) student cell phones from schools.

The following month, the New York Sun reported on how teachers, students, and parents see the use of cell phones in the classroom as of great benefit.

The State of Utah is requiring schools to adopt a cell phone policy, and have created two model policies. [1] [2] Let’s hope that schools choose an enlightened route.

And while I know that Google search returns are not a reliable means of measuring much, searching for student cell phones cheating returns over a million results. And yet, performing well on tests leads some schools to reward students with… wait for it… a cell phone!

Are you confused about the proper role of cell phones in schools?

Cell phones are no longer just about talking on the phone. Cell phones are portable computers, multimedia players, PDAs, game systems, cameras, and web browsers. I use my iPhone for all of theses things and as a flashlight, a level, and GPS.

Ban cellphones? Just say no! We have to embrace these devices!

Will cell phones lead some students get off task? Well, let’s see. Do some students daydream? Do they pass notes? Do they absentmindedly doodle in their notebooks? Do they fake attention while secretly retiring to their own thoughts and fantasies? Do students fall asleep in mid-lecture?

The cell phone is not a culprit in off-task behavior. Yes, such devices can be addictive for some students (and adults, I should hasten to add.) American Idol is addictive for some. (Thank God I’m not one.)

Educators are smart people. We can figure this out. Especially if we enlist students in helping us think about cell phones and if we use our own phones for more than (gasp!) making phone calls. (E.T. Twitter home!)

Schools, including my own, should take a look at their cell phone policies and probably just throw them out. Incorporate cell phones into your overall school acceptable use policy. And if you’ve not looked at your AUP in while, it’s time to dust that off, too. Take a look at my previous post, From Acceptable to Honorable, to see one suggestion to approaching this.

As an educational technologist I should be eager to make a pilgrimage to NECC (National Educational Computing Conference). But, alas, in good conscience I can’t do this, nor can I urge others to go either. It has little to do with the NECC conference per se, and a lot to do with large conferences in general.

The time has come, I believe, to re-think large conferences, their purposes, and their place in the educational landscape.

Here are some of my problems with large conferences.

1. Conferences are large producers of greenhouse gases. Huge facilities such as hotels and convention centers consume enormous amounts for heating, cooling, and lighting. But by far the most intensive source of greenhouse gas emissions is the air travel associated with moving large numbers of people to and form the conference city.

2. Conferences are large sources of waste products. There’s a mind-boggling number of cute but otherwise useless tchotchkes, wasted handouts, brochures, business cards, and other materials associated with vendor booths and conference sessions. There’s also an impressive amount of food waste associated with luncheons, receptions, happy hours, and the like that can’t be donated to charitable organizations or shelters after sitting on top of a Sterno-heated buffet dish for hours.

3. Conferences promote a culture of consumerism. How could they not? Conferences are designed to inform people about new products. Conferences are underwritten by major corporate sponsors who see them as marketing opportunities to promote and sell their products. Have you ever been to a booth where the sales people tell you “You’re just fine with the stuff you’re using now! In fact, here’s a list of ways to make your product last for five more years!” I’ve previously written about the opportunities presented by our economic recession to examine our spending priorities, and I invite readers to take a look at that post.

4. Conferences model an outmoded and inappropriate instructional model. The instructional model of most conferences is is very “sage on the stage” oriented; this is in opposition to the model  progressive educators are trying to move towards, the “guide on the side.” Surely there are better systems for one-to-many communication than putting someone on a stage in front of hundreds of people sitting in uncomfortable chairs, in rooms that are too hot or too cold, but never Goldilocks “right.” (I’m always stuck next to the blabbermouth who’s arranging dinner for eight on his cell phone and bragging about how wasted he got the other night.)

5. Conferences are a questionable use of scarce professional development dollars. Given the cost of travel, lodging, and meals it can be very expensive to send someone to a conference. Those funds might be better spent for an in-depth training experience at a local university, or bringing an expert to your school for an in-service program for all faculty.

6. Many conference attendees are the already converted. What is the value in sending your school’s technology director or academic technology to NECC year after year? How much new information do they really glean form such events? Sure, we wizards love to “to confer, converse, and otherwise hob-nob with [our] brother [and sister] wizards,” but we have many opportunities to do this in other ways.

7. The mammoth size of national conferences depersonalizes the learning experience. NECC expects 18,000 attendees in Washington, D.C. this year. This means huge sessions, standing room only crowds, and packed exhibit halls. It’s a great way to meet lots of people in a short time, but that’s also the problem. It’s very difficult to have in-depth learning occur in such a frenetic environment.

Okay, wise guy. What are the alternatives?

It’s time to rethink the national conference. We’re “21st century” teachers and learners. What does that mean for conferences?

I think it means the following:

• smaller, more nimble events that arise out of a community of educators with an interest in joint learning, collaboration, and exploration
• virtual events, linking learners across geographic and time boundaries
• open content, with the proceedings of events not controlled by an organization who sells archived presentations for profit
• an emphasis on environmental and economic sustainability, with electronic document exchange, low costs and modest technical needs to participate

Clearly, I don’t have all the answers. And you may think that my analysis of national conferences is way off, that they still play an important and vital role for educators that far outweigh any downsides. I welcome your ideas, comments, and arguments.

If you teach in Missoula, Montanta, you can’t show The Story of Stuff (below) in your classroom. As reported in the Missoulian, a local Biology teacher has been banned from showing the video because it violates the school’s policy about controversial issues and academic freedom. Apparently, the Board believes the video to be one-sided.

Personally I think this is a marvelous little film, and I am outraged (but not surprised, based on what I know of Montana politics) that this has happened. But the important thing is that people engage in the dialog about this. Express your voice by writing to the Missoula board of education and/or the local paper: