Blogging for my son Follow up

Honestly I am too weary to blog anything about anything. The principal scheduled me to do a workshop about blogging and I told her clearly that I would not be able to be there in the following letter.

Dear #########:

Before I can make a decision as to whether to work on this project with you for your school there are several things that have to be taken into consideration. First of all, when I volunteered to facilitate blogging in my child's class I had no intention of facilitating it for the whole school or putting in a permanent content management system in my child's teacherÂ’s class that could be used for her students the following year.

My intention was to introduce the children of my son's classroom to blogging, a simple brief introduction which may have ended after the social studies fair and if ##########had decided to continue on with it after this it would have been under her facilitation. I was looking forward to assisting the children choose topics to blog on such as, writing and posting an article on Open Source Software and asking them to post their thoughts on why someone would want to work for free and did they think it was fair etc. Asking them to read Tupac Shakurs Poem about the Concrete Rose and asking them to post their thoughts on it, Reading Langston Hughes I've Known Rivers and asking them to post their thoughts on it. This was not an attempt to just introduce a content management program to the school or classroom. This was my attempt to 1. Allow the children to work their thoughts out for their social studies projects and 2. Expose them to the extensive knowledge that I have in two areas Information Technology and African American Culture. I particularly wanted to expose them to African American cultural figures due to the violence my son had experienced in route to school.

To repeat myself my intention when volunteering in my child’s classroom was not to assist in implementing a school wide content management system which a school wide blogging program would be. The technical requirements for a recurring blogging system for each school year are vastly different then for a project done with eighteen students. If you notice most of the links that I posted on the quick reference blog I created http://bloggingresourcesforchildren.blogspot.com/ were blogs created by individual teachers not whole schools. The desire for a blog for a whole school requires software to be uploaded to the school server to handle the intensive needs of multiple blogs. There are plenty of open source content management systems available if your server has the proper languages installed on it which are generally php and mysql.

Finally if your content needs do not require any adjustments it will be free from an open source point of view, however if you require adjustments to the existing program most likely you will have to pay a coder to make these adjustments. I know how to install php programs but I am not particularly experienced in programming php. I program in the following languages CGI/PERL, COLDFUSION, JavaScript, SQL, XHTML, CSS, and very limited JAVA.

Unfortunately I can not meet with you on Friday October 14, 2005. I have a prior appointment.

Sincerely,

She responded with the following:

Thank you for your response. Yes, we do want you to introduce blogging to your son's class, as of now.The other teachers were invited so that they can learn more about theprocess. Yes, a simple brief introduction is fine. Yes, as of now we want to limit it to the Social Studies projects. However, I have spoken to several teachers on the staffand they have some knowledge of blogging. They want to learn more about it. All activities related to blogging have to be related to the Quality CoreCurriculum or to the Georgia Performance Standards. I believe we can work the standards and the QCCs into this project. Again, I realize it is not just an attempt to introduce a content management program to the class. We must work through the instructional dept. to make sure we are within the realm of the standards and the QCCs. Selected poetry and other writings must be appropriate for the students inthe 4th grade.Yes, I realize that your intentions were not to implement the project forthe entire school. What day and time can you meet with us so we can follow up with this request? Mrs. Shelton from Information Systems is looking forward toworking with us to implement this in your child's class.

Please give me a call at ######## so we can fine tune the date and time. Give me a call around 7:15 a.m. or later. I look forward to your call.

"I never called becuase I did not have a date to give her."

Why did she have teachers and students in my son's classroom awaiting a blogging workshop that I clearly stated I would not be able to give yesterday becuase I had a prior appointment. She called me yesterday morning stating she understood that I would not be there becuase I was in a bad car accident and would not be there, but I never agreed to be there in the first place regardless of the accident. I write to this blog becuase I feel voiceless. I feel that my reputation has been put on the line to be responsible for something that I never agreed to be responsible for and instead of pulling my hair out in anxiety I blog.