A few weeks ago my principal asked me to talk about my students’ web page to the staff at one of our regular meetings. He sees that my students are interested in writing now because they are big time WWW authors.

I told the teachers that the web is a two-way medium, which was a new idea for some of them, and I showed them the work my students are publishing there. Some of the kids are coming in to school now with hand written stories that they want to type and publish. What teacher wouldn’t like that? I had their attention.

I also showed the teachers a flickr page I made for our school, and a wiki that I set up by taking advantage of the wikispaces for educators offer. None of that is especially interesting yet, since it’s all in a germinal stage. I showed them a del.icio.us page that I set up for the school, and I finished with Karl Fisch’s, “Did You Know?” which was a complete hit!

On the final slide of the powerpoint, there was spontaneous and enthusiastic applause. It wasn’t just people being polite. I told the group that I’d be happy to help anyone who wanted to work on a project using the internet. Someone said, “Can we take a class?” This was perfect, because I’d discussed that ahead of time with my principal - me teaching a course for a credit or two after school, and helping folks put classroom projects together - so now I get to develop a course outline. There were about a dozen people interested. Over the next few days I heard from several people about how they liked what I showed them.

In the meantime, the librarian really liked the del.icio.us idea, and she did another presentation at a staff meeting this week that featured it, and now we have about 5 of us bookmarking links, building a resource. It isn’t a big thing, but it’s something, and it’s a new thing. It’s fun seeing how and what other people are tagging.

One of the teachers with a laptop bookmarked her favorite pet supply and information site while the meeting was wrapping up. She’s a dog-lover. I noticed that she did that, and suggested to the group that maybe we’d want to limit our contributions for the school bookmarks to school-related items. Several people agreed, and I mentioned that anyone could open their own personal account. I showed a couple of teachers sitting near me in the meeting that I have a del.icio.us account of my own that is networked to the school’s, and that I use the for:denali.elem tag to forward links to the school account without having to log in to it.

Two or three of my female teacher pals started looking at the 3500+ links that I’ve saved over the last two years, and some eyebrows raised. I was talking to someone else when they called me over for some friendly abuse. The teasing was mainly good-natured male bashing by a bunch of working moms who said things like “I wonder who does the laundry and the dishes at your house,” meaning of course that I spend too much time poking around the internet, and that I must be like their own lazy husbands, or that I must not be like their otherwise generally useful husbands.

See, there’s a prejudice against computers and the internet. If I watched TV or fixed up old cars, or trained for marathons, they wouldn’t say anything. We traded insults and defended ourselves, with me telling them that I do my share at home, and that they were really talking about their own worthless husbands, and them asking me if I ever see my kids, and insisting they were only joking. We’re friends. But I got the drift.

Good thing I didn’t tell them about RSS and blog readers or they’d have had some serious doubts about me.

Based on this recent experience, it seems unlikely that any sudden mass migration of elementary teachers to web-based professional networking will happen unless it gets the laundry done, the dishes washed, or the kids driven to their dance lessons.