Classroom Management and IT

Things go wrong. Very wrong sometimes. For instance last week I tried to use storybird.com with netbooks. Great right. Yes it worked fine and http://www.storybird.com is an awesome story telling website and I even tried it out with my 7 year old daughter before hand at home.

So what could go wrong? I reserved bandwidth at school, had it all set up, logged in ready to roll. I gave a demo on the PC with OH projector, kids are stoked! They set themselves down at their netbooks, one for each learner and get stuck into it. One by one I see hands raising in the air…Hmm what could it be? ‘Mr Jay’, they cry- ‘the picture is TOO small! I cant see it very well and I cant read what I type’. In the words of Mr H.J. Simpson – DOH! So I tested it before hand but NOT on the exact hardware they were going to use! So we fumbled through it, I couldnt increase the size so in the end we went to plan B- catch up on our Reading A-Z programme. And thats my message today. ALWAYS HAVE A PLAN B (AND C). So the kids didnt know any different really, I read the kids frustration and we went on to plan B somewhat seamlessly. But what If I had no backup plan?

Good class management skills = succcessful IT implementation.