What are the roadblocks?
Roadblock 1: lack of teacher training in the district in and around ICT. What I find most baffling of all is that the digital citizenship page discussed in previous posts was news to me. I had never seen it before doing the work for this course. It was never pointed out to me at a proD, nor did we receive email from the authors of the pages indicating that they had been added to the district website.
Roadblock 2: making the Internet seem scary and dangerous to parents. The parent resource page contains merely links to cyber bullying and Internet safety related sites.
Roadblock 3: concerns about privacy and cloud computing on US servers have discouraged teachers from using applications that allow students to publish in the real world instead teachers are encouraged to use the SharePoint platform which is all password protected. Makes it nearly impossible for students to “share everything” and “talk to strangers” in any real world authentic sense. (They do provide permission forms for each of the approved applications on the digital citizenship page but as mentioned above I didn’t know about those until two days ago. Not to mention that separate permission forms for every single application seems a pain in the butt.)
Roadblock 4: Access and ease-of-use are hampered by District policies such as the inability to download anything onto network computers and strict controls on District iPads which prevent the purchase of apps and the use of air printers. These policies create the need to call in an IT support staff person to do many simple things.
All that isn’t even taking into account other roadblocks like lack of funding in general and lack of access to infrastructure such as bandwidth, hardware etc. in particular.
BYOD is starting to look like a solution to many of these problems because, left to our own devices, we can work around issues and have more freedom using our own devices!