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NORTON - Ray Dewar, the principal of Norton High School, believes that school administrators must be accessible if they want to create a positive learning environment.

Dewar also thinks it's a bad idea to pick majors in high school. And that the MCAS assessment test "tries to be too many things at the same time." And that "Burn Notice," a spy thriller on the cable network USA, is the best show on television.

Dewar has shared these and other insights on Schools Without Walls, his new blog, or Web log, an Internet journal where he posts entries for anyone to read.

The blog format has exploded in popularity on the Internet in recent years; Technorati, a leading blog indexer, is currently tracking more than 107 million blogs worldwide.

Dewar launched his own blog in July, and has since posted more than two dozen individual entries. "You want to spark a discussion. You want to make the community aware of what's going on," he said in an interview. "I try to be as accessible as possible (in person) to the faculty and the students, but some of the stuff that goes into the blog they're not necessarily going to see or hear from me."

He added, "Hopefully it makes me a little more accessible."

Dewar's posts range in length from an extended report on a recent team-building exercise ("I was hoping for a greater turnout, but we were a bit sabotaged by three weddings, Yom Kippur and a broken toilet") to a brief observation that there are now more Americans in college dorms than in prisons ("Way to go literacy").

Usually the topic is education - though earlier this month a request for him to write about a different subject led Dewar to post a 320-word discussion of Cheez-It crackers, which he called "a destination snack" because they do not translate well to traveling.

Dewar was a fairly early adopter of the Internet. His first exposure to e-mail was in 1995, when he was teaching in Ecuador and found it to be the most convenient way to stay in touch with people back home in the States.

Dewar, who was an assistant principal at NHS before taking over as principal, said he feels strongly that educators need to incorporate more technology into the way they do their jobs.

Blogs, he said, provide a more informal space for administrators, teachers, and students to interact outside of school. With his encouragement, Assistant Principal Mike Barth and a number of other NHS teachers have all started blogging, too.

"This is a tool, and when it makes your job easier or better, you use it," Dewar said.

And, he added, the students are paying attention.

"A lot of kids say, 'I read your blogs,' " Dewar said. "The reason I found out that the two from Monday weren't posted (due to a technical glitch) was because kids asked me, 'Why haven't you posted this week?' " Ted Nesi can be reached at 508-236-0434 or tnesi@thesunchronicle.com.