Over the past years, my English Department colleagues and I have spent plenty of time staring curiously over the other side of the teaching fence. In other words, we have pondered and discussed how new online capabilities could enhance our literature and writing classrooms. For older teachers, the discussion was more theoretical than practical. We were the ones still struggling to figure out how to save documents correctly, so we didn’t really imagine our students blogging, on security protected websites, anytime soon. Readier to roll were our 20- to 30- something colleagues who were out ahead, dashing off complexly formatted assignment sheets and graphic organizers a la Microsoft Word. Three years ago, when a younger colleague started a blog for her students, her creation was as foreign to me as the process of making a gourmet chocolate soufflé—the result surely looked tantalizing,  but I knew I would  never have the time to learn to make one.

The thought–“I’d like to, but I don’t have the time”— lodged in my mind for the two years in which I questioned whether or not to get on the digital bandwagon. I was a full-time high school English teacher, whose limited free time was devoted to the demands of single motherhood, a college student to pay for and high school student to raise.  After weekdays of teaching, meetings, e-mailing, and grading— after  weekends of  laundry and bills, cooking and driving my fifteen-year-old daughter to dance lessons and parties–I knew exactly what I wanted to do: fall dead asleep. Learning to blog was far down my wish list, way below getting some exercise and seeing old friends.  In my summers, with the temporary disappearance of my teen companions, the digital universe lost much of its luster, comparing unfavorably to gardening or reading a best-seller, hanging out in a café or taking an afternoon nap. Summer was the time to recuperate, not bend over a laptop to figure out the difference between Ning and Twitter.

However, as I’ve watched my students and my own teenage daughter establish increasingly co-dependent relationships with their cells phones, iPods, and Facebook pages, I came to understand that, as an English educator, I had no choice but to change. My students were no longer simply devoted users of 21^st- technologies that gave them access to resources and communications. Now, those technologies were an inseparable and intimate part of their teen lingo, adolescent social life, and emerging personal identity.  In short, I was looking straight into a generation gap, one that I knew I needed to orient to one way or another. Was I going to remain a digital foreigner and maintain a classroom that denied my students’ digital selves, or was I going to journey to their side and engage my students’ digital psyches in the call to learning?

I might have done nothing at all—except continue to ponder and stand by my mantra, “I don’t have time”—had I not crossed paths with Daniel McDonough, Senior Marketing Manager for High School at Bedford/ St. Martin’s Press. He put before me the following challenge: Try Bedford/St. Martin’s online classroom, CompClass, for a year and write for the readers of High School Bits about the experience. Apart from asking me to write monthly reports on my progress, St. Martin’s placed no restrictions on my online journaling. They asked for an honest account of my travels in online teaching as a means of informing high school English teachers of the learning environment and applications available them in the software.  The offer of these two carrots –jumping to the other side of the teaching fence, while writing honestly about my journey there–was too good to forgo. Here was a chance to be a traveler, to join the migration of educators who had settled and colonized as digital natives. I could stay in the Old World, of books, paper or pen, or I could voyage to a New World of e-books and podcasts, blogs and threaded discussions, online writing tools and editing forums. Like most passages to unknown destinations, I guessed the trip would be disorienting. But I had made my decision: I was going to leave the old country behind and migrate permanently to the 21^st-century online classroom.

These are the questions that come to school with me daily, that preoccupy me after hours, and find their way into my writing. This blog is a means of engaging these questions in all their 21st-century complexity and messiness.