How tech-comfy?

I think the main worry that teachers interested in doing a project like mine have is that they don't know enough about how to use computers and internet tools. While planning this project, I didn't really think that attitude was justified - firstly, it's far easier to set up and maintain a wiki than people think; and secondly, the students already know so much, there's a good chance that they can do most of what they need to do without any help anyway.

After almost two weeks, though, I'm beginning to wonder.

Firstly, it's proving more troublesome and problematic than I thought to maintain the wiki. The students don't know a lot about how they work; and there are more small niggles to solve than I expected. For example, all my students have been working a lot with Windows Movie Maker. That program is very versatile (more than I realised - I've almost never used it). But it creates files in the .wmv format. That ought to be fine for anybody; but Wikispaces seems to have problems with it. So we've needed to download software to change the format to .flv, which Wikispaces can manage. For me and a few of my students, this sort of technical dexterity is no problem. But for less tech-comfy teachers, it might turn into a bit more of a headache.

Secondly, the students often need more convincing of the merits of certain programs than I expected. I've needed to set homework of getting the students to "spend half an hour or so" on a website, simply getting to know it. Simple examples created by myself are not really enough to get the students to try things for themselves. And while most students are comfortable enough with the internet to learn for themselves just by having a play with a website, some of them need some guidance. That means that teachers with less experience are going to have to spend a fairly significant amount of time getting to know a few useful programs. And often, the students will simply say, "I don't like that site". Often that'll be totally justified - the students, for example,have shown me the advantages of using Windows Movie Maker instead of a slideshow creator like Voicethread. But sometimes the students just don't want to spend the time they need to learn aboutn what's possible with a tool.

So to answer the initial question - you do have to be fairly comfortable with technology to work with a project like this. You can't rely on your students to teach you everything - you'll need to spend time getting to know, in particular, the Wiki software you choose to use. I wouldn't want to overestimate the difficulty of this - if you have someone to show you the ropes, or if you can work through things with a couple of colleagues, it shouldn't take long. But I do think it's an investment you need to be aware of the need to make.