Dear Terri,

It is a privilege and an honour for me to be your child's teacher this year. I really mean that. Teaching is all I have ever wanted to do and I realize that not everyone is lucky enough to be able to follow their passion.

Your child is entering a new world of learning and the world he is entering is not the one you or I grew up in. Learning does not just happen at a certain time, in certain places and with certain people.

While I have always been passionate about learning, what I learned in university was not enough to make me the kind of teacher that I wanted to be. I have since discovered that the world is bigger than a classroom. Now, I connect online every day with other passionate educators from around the world who share ideas, discuss the latest learning research and challenge my thinking.

This has so transformed my thinking and my ability to learn that I want that same experience for your child. The world your child will be living in will be connected in ways we can only imagine. He will be expected to be an active participant in I this global society. I want him to learn how to be a learner and to be able to learn from other children and adults from around the world in a safe and respectful way.

We will do this in lots of different ways, but our primary connections will be through our classroom blog, through Skype and through Twitter. In past years, these connections have brought incredible learning, empathy and joy into our classroom. These connections are not in addition to reading, writing and arithmetic. They ARE how we learn reading, writing and arithmetic.

Through these online connections, we have learned to read and write in authentic ways with a global audience. In the process, we have also learned serendipitous things about the Greek alphabet, volcanoes in New Zealand, floods in Australia, ocean animals off the Eastern coast and, well, a lot of other things. We have been able to learn all of these things because of the power and possibilities provided by online tools.

So when your child comes home to say that he talked with a child in New Zealand on Skype, or that he received a blog comment from someone in Wisconsin or read a tweet from New Hampshire, celebrate with him, and know that he is on his way to understanding how to be a connected learner.

I can't wait to see what we will learn together this year.

Kathy Cassidy