2008-2009 and 2009-2010 have been two very tough years for most private schools. They need your financial support now more than ever. Almost any school I can think of can use your end of the calendar year gift for several things including:

• Financial aid
• Refurbishment of plant and equipment
• Endowment of teaching positions
• Enhancement of existing programs

Consult your tax adviser for details. Speak with your school's development person. Do what you can to help the school which gave you such a great start in life.

You can tweet your comments to me at PRIVATESCHL.

Part of the private school application process is the teacher recommendation. Most schools want you to provide a recommendation from your English teacher and one from your math teacher. The recommendation forms are preprinted and include an envelope addressed to the admissions office. Be sure to give these forms to the teachers as soon as you can, bearing in mind that they probably have several recommendation forms to complete. Please don't ask the teachers to tell you what they wrote about your child. They are not supposed to do that. Their comments are confidential. As a courtesy to the teachers, affix a first class postage stamp to each envelope. Your thoughtfulness will be appreciated.

You can tweet your comments to me at PRIVATESCHL.

Cyber Monday is a good time to reflect on the 40th birthday of the Internet. Listeners Recall First Time On The Internet on NPR's All Things Considered tonight reminded me of my own first experiences with going online. It was 1992. We were in The Bahamas. The Internet was my lifeline to the outside world. Dial-up modems running at a breathtaking 2400 baud allowed me to access the baby World Wide Web. The treasures I found on ancient Rome enriched my Latin classes. My 7th grade history students loved the email exchanges with students in classrooms halfway around the world. In retrospect it all seems so primitive, and , I guess, it was. But it was exciting. It was so exciting to have the world at your fingertips. News, museums, research - it was all right there.

In 2009 I cannot imagine living my life without the Internet. Search tools like Google and Bing and reference sites such as Wikipedia and our own About.com all provide information and answers in a nanosecond. I don't teach middle and high school students any more. No more excursions in search of the perfect photo of Pompei. Nowadays my adult students take it all for granted. The Internet just has always been there. All of our work is done on web-based applications and interfaces which the Internet has made possible.

Private schools generally were early adopters of technology. Kent School, for example, partnered with IBM in the mid-90s. Other schools had similar initiatives. Now wireless campuses with both the original or commercial Internet and the newer academic Internet2 are fairly common. Desktop computers have yielded to laptops. An always accessible Internet is like having a virtual library at your fingertips. Whether you access it from an iPhone or netbook, this 40 year old Internet is worth celebrating.

Were you teaching 40 years ago? Do you remember those first tentative online connections with uncooperative phone lines and screechy modems? Share your recollections with us please. You can tweet me at PRIVATESCHL or leave a comment below.

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece entitled Is Technology the Answer to our Education Problems? Being the geek I am, I saw the issue back then as a simple case of teachers not wanting to adapt to change. I had computerized the Anglican schools in The Bahamas back in the '90s and had seen the strong resistance to change on the part of teachers and administrators.

I recently updated that article. In the course of doing my research, I began to see the issue from another point of view. Why? Because putting computers in the nation's class rooms was supposed to fix our education problems. Computers would enhance teaching, stimulate students' interest, make lessons exciting and so on. But that really wasn't the issue as I discovered. The issue had to do with administrators at every level not having the data in real time with which to drive their decisions. In other words, if a particular class was having trouble with quadratic equations or a grade district-wide was struggling with social studies, the administrators had no way of producing the reports they needed in real time to see the trends as they developed.

What do you think of my conclusions? What have I missed? Are there other points which should be emphasized? You can tweet your comments and thoughts to me at PRIVATESCHL.