To Learn Twice

Here is a great break through in information. Guess what? Test scores are late and school report cards are not ready. What brings this great news to light? The Chicago Sun-Times reports today that they won't be able to print their edition of school report cards because schools have no test data to base them on. Why the news flash all of a sudden? How did we go through a whole gubernatorial election and this point wasn't made? Did someone at the Sun-times just look at last year's calendar and say "Oh crap! We are supposed to run the school report card issue and we have no school report cards!" They write the article like this is terrible because they won't have that issue ready, and by the way, the entire educational process in the state of Illinois is thrown off by this. Once again - the press and the public only pays attention to education when there is a hitch that impacts them. Yet there are gobs of pages flowing out there about the "Tom...

I now know what it must have been like to be Jekyll and Hyde. I - Hank Thiele - a true believer in games for learning, the power of computers and play, the impact of open information - has become the hammer of control. I do this for a sound educational reason though. We have instituted a process through our network that allows us to block users from running any application we choose. This has allowed us to prevent students from installing and playing games on our computers. Couple this with Websense and we have came pretty close to locking games out of our educational setting. This has now allowed me to move to the next step, getting users to delete all of those applications off of their network drives. They can't use them anyway. This is where my uneasiness begins. It is my responsibility to make sure that the network operates efficiently, has no unlicensed software on it, and is used for educational purposes. So I have laid down the gauntlet and have required that all stu...