Elizabeth Fullerton left a comment a couple of days ago that brings up once again the many difficulties that teachers are experiencing as they start to try to implement Weblogs into their schools.
I’ve just begun my first attempt with exposing students to blogging and I spent the entire first semester running in circles with our school board technology policies…[the culture of blogging] is evolving faster than many of our system policies are. My school system just isn’t equipped policywise and technologywise to handle my foray into the blogosphere.
No doubt there are many others in her situation. Pat has been saying for a long time that the hurdles most teachers have to jump over to get seriously into Weblogs are still too high. Policies, hardware, time, lack of technical support…we’ve got a long way to go.
Makes me appreciate where I am… at Beacon, I’m actually really letting blogging just grow organically. I worry that if I was to push it harder, we’d get so much demand for it that it would be really hard to keep track of and evaluate.
After one semester, we’ve got two teachers keeping personal blogs, a college counselor running her office through blogging, three classes experiments with it, and five or six students writing. I think two or three more teachers will experiment with it this semester… and I really wish I did have more time to play with the literary magazine folks to help them get into it.
But I’m lucky, Beacon has always had a focus on technology infusion into a progressive pedagogy and an open community, so we’ve been able to do a lot.