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Thou Shalt Blog

If you want classroom technology to be used in imaginative and effective ways, you have to let teachers discover those methods on their own. You cannot force innovation.

That’s the mantra I’ve heard for years from educators, administrators, and even technology advocates. And as the author of a new blog on student motivation (I was encouraged, but not required, to launch it), I’m now in a position to appreciate firsthand the wisdom of that approach.

But districts’ expectations of teachers have kept pace with changes in technology, and in some places, that bottom-up philosophy has been replaced by a more top-down approach. The mostly rural school district in Goochland County, Virginia, for one, now requires that all its teachers maintain classroom blogs to improve communication with...