I don’t
know if I’ve just entered the blogging community at the right time or what, but
I sure am seeing lots of convergence between my ideas and what I’m reading
right now. Tom Hoffman is talking about a
school-wide blogging system – and that’s what I am looking for. Unfortunately, he says such a system really
isn’t in place – and might not be for quite some time.
        That’s a
real bummer, because I was hoping to find just such a system when I began this
little odyssey of mine. What I’ve found is slightly different.   
        The tools
are out there – those for creating easy, ad-free blogs, that is – as are free
content enhancement tools (sites like Furl
for storing and showing reading, Flickr for photos), but
I don’t know if there are tools that exist that are a total package – instead
of the piecemeal system that one could create if one wants to (and I do, which
is why I am here).   
        I don’t want
blogging to become an exercise in technology training. That’s why I was excited when I realized that
I didn’t need any HTML background to get a blog up and running. I don’t have any experience coding, and I
don’t have the time to learn right now – my job is to teach language arts, not
computers. Even though my students need those skills, my primary interest is in helping students work with information.  But if my students have to
take a large percentage of their blogging time to find ways to shoehorn these
various content management tools together, is that useful or will that be a
hurdle?  Or a roadblock?  (The optimist in me screams "Opportunity!" but he’s being beaten down today by reminders of past classroom failure.)
        I think
about students that don’t have computers at home, and don’t have hours upon
hours of time to devote to learning how they work. They need to be blogging, not setting up a blog (two very different
skills, I realize, thanks to Will’s gentle reminder).     #