Day two of Web logs for teachers yesterday and everything pretty much tanked…Blogger wouldn’t create sites for certain people, the Internet was slow, and I lost half the class (of six) when I started showing Manila.
Partly my fault, I know, ’cause I haven’t had the time to really sit down and spend the time trying to figure out if I can create a template that takes some of the difficulty out of all of this. It’s like by the time I get to the posting stuff I’ve gone through so much other bs that it causes comments like “Will, I don’t know how I’d ever use this in my classroom if you weren’t in there with me.”
Great.
Maybe I’m looking at this all wrong. Maybe I should just be getting them posting first and thinking template second. <rant> And let’s face it…a lot of the templates are really flaky. You add one post and the table cells fly out all over the place. You can’t even find the edit buttons ’cause they’re off the page somewhere… There, I feel a little better.</rant> Or, maybe I should just not do any training until I have the time to prep for it. (Have I mentioned what my days look like with my new job? My life is now one long meeting…)
Hang in there, Will. This revives the nightmare of my first attempt to train my department in using message boards. I had prepared to the max. I was gonna SELL these puppies. Then literally ten minutes before the session was to begin our tech director informs me that the network will probably be down for about half of the time I had planned on… and then, after ducking that one, I found that the system’s firewall would not allow anyone to register for their own board. I currently have that old filter problem with Blogger, too.
I wonder how many schools end up shooting themselves in the foot like this. We are encouraged to use all of this fantastic stuff, but then run into one obstacle (of the school’s own making) after another.