Blue Skies and other ideal solutions

[apoth0r]

Agree with you that a sudden stop isn't the answer.
Possibility of pushing things to faculties rather than school-wide everytime?
Faculty target changes everytime so that teachers aren't bombarded with everything at once, which occassionally happens.
Not sure where i'm going with this really but I have many friends who teach who would rather ignore I.T than take it on board and use it. (due to the fact that they have no faith in it lasting - which raises a similar issue)

[SYNACK]

I agree with the user buyin bit, we try to push any new stuff out to the senior people and team leaders first to give them a chance to use it and get excited about it. They show it off and hopefully have a good experience with it so that when it is pushed out most of the other staff are activly asking for it. This does not alway work but seems to have had an alright success rate. Thanks to Volume licensing we also go up version by version and so as the changes are in much smaller increments than a two edition jump have a comparitvly shallow learning curve. We also tend to push it to the teacher laptops first as the first step of a full deployment and this gives the teachers time to adjust before the class pcs change also. Moving them all in a batch means that they are all in the same boat to so that asking questions of the team leaders is seen as normal and accepted rather than an admission of failure (again in most cases).

There are always some who will hold back and bemoan the movement from one OS or application to another but that is something that there is really no solution to and will occour anywhere.

[GrumbleDook]

It is not just down to how you introduce technology ... is it about changing anything in a school. Grumbledook Blogs I covered some of this and you see some schools out there that are brilliant at it, but it is partly down to the mind-set of staff (not just teachers ... there are lots of site supervisors, exams officers and, dare I say it, IT Support staff who resist change), but it is also down to the mind-set of the senior leadership/management in the school.

[spannerman2]

I really get the sense from this forum that 'edugeeks', who by and large are( I assume) IT support staff perceive that there is a problem with getting teachers on board with IT developments.

Looking at the educational background of ALL of the new coalition cabinet (I am really that much of a nerd) I predict that a) there will be a focus on teacher-lead control of what happens in class and b) a very pragmatic even jaundiced attitude to IT.

I think it is time that techs 'love bomb' teachers before the collective worms turn