Blogs on Teacher Leadership

It may be that the study of geography starts as a personal path. My personal geographic journeys started in the pages of National Geographic. I would read the articles over and over and dream about going to the various countries.

The exhibits at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) are housed in an enormous, loud room with vendors eagerly trying to grab your attention and pitch their products. They range from large publishing houses to new software companies and Web site purveyors to providers of full curricula for K-12 schools.

Every semester, I reformat my classroom computers to get old junk off and update the applications. A couple semesters ago, I decided to leave iChat (Apple's instant messaging application) active, although I did not put the icon on the desktop, nor did I tell the kids.

At a meeting last year, John Gage, chief researcher and vice president of the science office for Sun Microsystems, came into the room with the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything tucked under his arm.