Brave New (Digital) World

As the homework goes digital, Thomas himself
(the third kid in line) turns into paper at the Elementary
School Open House

I still remember the first time I got an email account. It must have been 1995 or 1996 and I was the proud "owner" of a brand new Pegasus email account at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), where I was doing an Internship.

Not my children. Thomas is barely seven and Simon is almost ten, and at school they already have their own email accounts. And not only that: they also have their tiny little hands on the latest MacBook Pro. ("Mom, your computer [a 4-year old Sony Vaio] is sooo slow!") Simon of course already had some digital delights for a few years, but Thomas has now also joined the masses.

The boys' homework now also arrives through the digital world. No more excuses about dogs eating homework - the only possible excuse can be that Internet was down (which happened Monday night) or that the electricity was out (so far so good).

So--dear friends and family--if you want to follow along with the boys' academic activities this year, try this:

• Simon's class Website, with homework and a schedule of events each day. (You can quickly spot Simon in the top banner with his Heerenveen T-shirt.)
• The Grade 5 Website, with information for all the classes in Grade 5 (such as their upcoming 5th Grade Camp.)
• Simon's personal blog, a not-to-be-missed blog with regular updates, videos, and answers to homework assignments.

And, continuing to 2nd Grade:

• Thomas' class Website.
• Grade 2 Website.
• Thomas' personal blog (not that populated yet :-) ) 

Thomas also really enjoys checking the Website of his performing arts class, to listen to his teacher sing the songs they are learning in school.

Finally, even Dutch information is online.

• Grade 5 Dutch
• Grade 2 Dutch
• De Rode Leeuw, school information from the Dutch school, so eloquently named "the Red Lion."

It's a Brave New (Digital) World. If only Aldous Huxley could have blogged about it.

At the Elementary School Open House (where we, the parents, take copious notes on the ever growing number of blogs, "digital desks," and online resources our kids have access to.

At the Open House, an old-fashioned hand-written note by Thomas was waiting for us on his desk. I suppose the computer was not working that day.

In het Nederlands: Op de school van Simon en Thomas nu bijna alles digitaal: huiswerk, rekenen en soms zelfs ook digitale leesboekjes. Je kan op de blog van Simon kijken wat hij elke week (digitaal) uitspookt.

Wow- I am back!

Hi there,
I can't say that I really think you all are eagerly waiting for my next blog post -- I mean, I am sure you have busy lives to lead -- but I have to say that from my end, I am extremely happy to be back on my blog again.

A few posts ago I already reported that we had to install a "VPN" service to be able to access the sites that are blocked here by the Chinese government. Well, finally, in between Paul arriving back from Brazil, some teacher-parent conferences, and some miscellaneous busy-ness, we (meaning Paul of course) finally got around to it. So with this VPN service from WiTopia, we can now again access all the sites under the sun.

What is also so amazingly cool about this service -- and we are wondering why we did not buy it before -- is that now we can go on the Internet seemingly from anywhere in the world. When we open our VPN -- our own secure, special connection -- we can choose if we want to access the Internet through a server in Washington DC, in Amsterdam, or in any of the 30 or so cities on the list. You might wonder why this matters, but even in the U.S. we had noticed that you can't always access all the content on websites in another country. Especially with video clips of TV content, that clip might be blocked so that people won’t be able to access that video for free if (in their own country) the rights for that T.V. product were sold to someone else. (For example, if in the U.S. the television company NBC is paying a lot of money for the rights to show a certain swimming competition on T.V. they certainly don't want you to be watching that same competition for free on the Internet somewhere else.)

Oh well, this is just a long and elaborate way of saying that I am back. Hurrah!