Is Technology Worth it in the End?

I am full of frustration. I have spent the last two days working on two separate ways to incorporate technology into my class, and in retrospect, have lost a teaching day in the process. I began with trying to make a sort of dumping ground for my student's writing. At the last EARCOS conference I attended in Malaysia, Margriet Ruurs gave a fantastic seminar titled "The Power of Poems", she showed us this amazing website http://www.kalwriters.com/kidswwwrite/read.html where students submit their writing to enable each student to be published and shared with other classmates. My students just finished an amazing poetry project and each student has at least one poem worth sharing. I was surprised by the level of thought and purpose so many of my students displayed in their writing, especially some of my somewhat disinterested male students. Their poems are great and I wanted a safe place for them to share them with their classmates and feel a sense of accomplishment. Instead I spent hours trying to put something together http://inside.isb.ac.th/wattswriting/ and it is still not half of what I want it to be and I am not sure my students can access it the way I envisioned it at all. I am not going to give up on this one, but my level of frustration is at an all time high.

Then there is my big adventure into Wikiland. The 7th grade students just arrived back from the school trip to Korat. I thought I could help out my colleagues, and myself, by creating a wiki for the students to place their Korat photo essays http://korat2009.wetpaint.com/ . I thought the wiki would provide a nice place to showcase their hard work and provide students for next year an exemplar to model their essay from. Ahead of time I had my WWW student teacher try this out to make sure that it worked. He successfully submitted a photo and I was ready to introduce it to my class. Little did I know that a large percentage of my students are not old enough to join a wiki. And the ones that are old enough can download the pictures, but not the captions that they have spent the last two weeks working on. Now thanks to Chad, I have found a new way to correct this problem, but honestly the project is due in 3 hours, I do not have laptops booked for today, and it will be easier to have them dump the projects into StuShare into a folder for me to read. I feel like a fool now that I spent the time trying to create this, a fool for dedicating class time to something my students can not participate in due to their age, and a fool for thinking I created something great that my colleagues could use and then shared it to have it blow up in my face. Wouldn't scrap booking have been easier for my students and me? I know I am a neophyte, but at times this process can be incredibly frustrating. I could have spent this time with an amazing good book.