Thursday, October 15, 2009
When Technology Fails
Now that we have all this great technology to use. What do you do when a student works for hours on something and when he goes to print it or send it to you they can not find it anywhere on their network drive? I have had this happen to students many of times luckily for some of them I now how much time and effort that they put into it. I did not make them go back and re due it do to the fact we did not have time we needed to move on to the next thing. I tell them that they can re due it if they want but it will not be necessary I just made that assignment exempt from the grade book. And I know what you are going to say the student should have saved it in more than one spot well up until this year are students could not save to a flash drive they could only save in the network drive they have. I witnessed a teacher get very made at a student today because the assignment was not on his network drive. And I personal know that this student had it finished because the other day in my class they were finished with my work for the day and then they finished this particular assignment. I guess the point that Iam getting at is that technology is great but it just like humans it is not perfect all the time. We as educators that use technology need to be very flexible when situations like this come up.
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I totally agree. I think that flexibility is key. I have accepted rough drafts from students in place of a final copy because the document just disappeared. Another struggle that I have come across is my fifth graders typing a document here at school or creating something here at school and then not having the resources (a thumb drive or e-mail)to transfer their work to their home computer, that is if they have access to one. This makes it harder to do projects in a timely manner if everything has to be done at school. What i have done in many cases is e-mail their work to their parents' e-mail but this is not always possible. Again flexability is key!
ReplyDeleteYes, that is difficult when technology fails. We've all experienced it, I go to show a united streaming video and it keeps stopping. That was before I realized I needed to download it. Oops. Then the printer breaks or the printers in the school only print really bad quality and you can't hold it against students. If they have the ability to print it at home with color that's great but not everyone has them.
ReplyDeleteThe ones that I have had that this happens to are usually the ones who have not really been working in the first place. Last year we did have some trouble when they were changing servers. One lab had one server; the other lab had another. We couldn't always get into the same lab. There was a way to do it, but all students didn't follow the directions when they were given. That was an interesting time!
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