In 2006, Virginia passed into law a bill that requires teachers to instruct students about web safety and warning them about online predators.  While the idea of this is noble and necessary, I cringe at adding additional requirements on our teachers.  More and more, every day of the school year is being planned out for the teacher, limiting their flexibility in teaching topics with any depth.  I agree that teachers should address web safety issues in their classes from the earliest grades in which they use computers, but worry that legal requirements lead to more explicit teaching of this that may detract from content area studies.

Chapter 6 in Web 2.0 addresses technology leadership in the schools.  The emphasis on technology has to start at the top and work down to the classroom.  This does not mean that administrators must be technology experts, just as we would not expect them to be experts in specific content area.  Technology leadership should focus more on the leadership than on the technology.  Technologies change and new tools are readily available for teachers to use.  Technology leaders should remember to remain flexible, allowing teachers to use those tools that most adequately address the needs of their subject areas and of their students and encouraging them to use and view new tools.

Discussions of financing technology in the schools revolve largely around collaboration of federal, state, and corporate initiatives, weighing costs and benefits of initial and maintenance costs for equipment, and the use of open source software.  Some might argue that we cannot afford not to provide students with the opportunities to learn about and experience the technologies that they will need as they move on to life after high school.  While this long-term view may be accurate, the short-term reality is that school budgets are stretched as they are.  Such expenses may simply be too much for local school systems to incur without state and corporate support.  The discussion on open source software was an interesting one.  On the one hand, the use of free systems such as Linux could save local systems a great deal of money on both operating systems and software applications.  On the other hand, most teachers, administrators, and students are familiar with applications such as MS Word or MS Excel and use these applications at home.  Further, most corporations rely on MS Office products in their business operations.  Familiarizing students with applications that they are unlikely to use seems, to me, to be irresponsible.  Again, corporate involvement seems, to me, to be an appropriate solution to this funding problem because corporations are the most probable benefactors when students learn the tools that they will use in their future jobs.