One of my struggles has been helping students learn digital historical tools when I have only recently taught myself those same tools. For example, I've designed or modified others' lesson plans using voyant tools for distant reading or ArcGIS for historical mapping. I had a google maps engine lesson plan that I'd used for a while. . . and then google tweaked its interface and my lesson plan went down the toilet. So I learned ArcGIS instead.
None of these technologies are difficult to learn and all of them have a huge skills/jobs/I can do something amazing! payout. Still, if it takes me an hour to learn a digital tool, that's an hour I'm not grading, or participating in a discussion, or thinking about how to improve a lesson plan. Teachers, like creative types everywhere, must balance the acquisition and mastery of skills with the practice of those skills (for which we are paid).
In short, any minor, new technical skill I must acquire pulls me away from teaching, and that has meant long nights, and frequent moments of "this lesson plan is good-enough technologically" reflection. This pull between learning the new and relying on the old is a constant for professors, but I feel it more acutely as I'm trying to embrace digital history as a pedagogy.
