I’ve been looking at my blogroll and realize that it hasn’t changed since I first began blogging. I have spent time getting things organized on the blog and trying to find a voice for myself. I know that I often scan the blogroll of other bloggers but I just didn’t give much thought to my own. Tonight, I’ve been visiting different blogs and scanning their blogrolls. What impressed me was that on many of the blogs, the contents of the rolls are no longer just educators or those speaking on educational matters but people from all walks of life. This made me wonder if, as educators, we have reached a new step in our “learning”, beginning to expand beyond what we do and looking for people who have the same interests and hobbies or who catch our attention beyond our teaching.

missprofe has a very interesting post on when she begins to get back to the “groove” for school. I know that I posted my thoughts earlier this summer but I’ve found that those thoughts didn’t quite go as planned.

As a school principal, I have come to realize that summer holidays is just a time when students are not present. I’m not doing the paperwork or the other things that are connected with school administration. Instead, I find myself doing things that will allow us to achieve our goals for the upcoming year, planning out our staff pd times dealing with goals and looking at what we might be able to do for those students that are not engaged by school.

As the third week of holidays come to a close, I’ve spent very little time actually at the school, other than to check in to see how the renovations are going and to discuss getting our football field seeded and watered. Otherwise, I’ve been occupied do construction. This doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about school or, when I have the chance, doing some reading. But, it wasn’t how I actually saw my summer going. I was going to take time to do a bit of planning, focus on some key areas and slowly work through them, using the tools I’ve found to assist me in doing this. I was hoping to begin using my flickr much more and begin to build a catelogue of pics to use along the way. It hasn’t happened.

This is like my blogroll. I did plan to add to it and keep it up to date. I thought it would be a great idea to add new blogs and remove those that I don’t really visit anymore. However, like so many well made plans, life seemed to get in the way of such things and, on the importance scale, it soon fell off. Now, it’s not like my planning for next year isn’t important but I realized that there were other things to do this summer and, with all the time I put into various initiatives during the year, I just found that it wasn’t important at the time. As administrators and leaders, it is sometimes difficult to remember that we, too, need time for other things outside of education. That is why I was so impressed with the non-educational blogs that I’ve run across throughout my reading. They were refreshing king of like the people I’ve been working with these past three weeks. They’re non-educators and have reminded me that there is a world outside of education that isn’t necessarily caught up or even interested in school change. They see that things are changing but don’t necessarily see an immediacy to change what is going on in schools. They’ve been teaching me a great deal these past three weeks!

With this, I’ve decided that I should update my blogroll – it won’t be tonight or tomorrow so don’t be looking right now. It will take some time as I decide which blogs are on the “essential” list and which, although good, can be removed or maybe recategorized. Maybe I’ll have to do a bit more “research” to see how others are dealing with this. If you have any ideas or thoughts about the whole blogroll thing, I’d like to hear from you.