This post is not about a new technology but more of a reflection on when your planned use of technology goes wrong. We have learned of a lot of great tools that we can apply to learning, but what happens when the technology your relying on goes wrong. I remember when I was teaching a night class at DMACC. I Was relying on the standby powerpoint as a guide. Thus all of the activities and such that I had planned I used PowerPoint slides to show the instructions. I get to campus and my class is moved to a different room, that does not have an instructor PC, what now? This is one of those situations when you have to punt. Another example is in the college that I work for in California. We are in the middle of a pre-term start and running orientation for over a thousand students and the system that produces reports as to student progress goes down. How do we punt?
Just my thought for the evening?
YIKES! I hope you have strong legs for punting.
ReplyDeleteIt's always so stressful to rely so heavily on technology.
I've been in the broken technology boat regularly.
Have you thought about doing a risk analysis? What's the risk if the technology goes down? I think that may have helped in the first situation, but probably not the second - hard to have a back up plan for an online institution.
How did the rest of the orientation go? Were you able to find a work around?
Oh no, that is no fun. Challenging to say the least! It seems so easy to say that you have to have plan B, C & D. Always have one or two ways to do an exercise, never keep everything in one place, etc. When it comes right down to it, we have to have well developed designs that allow for flexibility and then, of course, be pretty quick on our feet . . . Hope things got worked out!
ReplyDeleteThis is quite funny but also really important. John I think you remember on Cris's training and design class, she mention if power point break down she will immediately called a break. Within a break she try to fix the issue but if that did not work she will put postage and drawing paper all over the places so that student can read them as power point. Its just one way of avoid total failure.
ReplyDeleteI think I may have mentioned this before but I had a job interview in which they asked me to present a Power Point - snooze. Anyway, so I put it together and emailed it to them as they requested. When I got there they didn't have it ready and asked me if I brought it with me. I DID, but it wasn't the final version. I was so irritated, but went with it. I quickly deleted a few slides I didn't want to use anymore and then carried on. It was annoying, though. I can imagine that in a classroom environment as well, it would be super irritating and flustering. I just think we always have to prepare for when the "system goes down".
ReplyDeleteIn my last class, I actually did my facilitation on "Event Planning 101: The importance of Plan B and how Not to need it."
ReplyDeleteYou can never plan for every failure, especially with technology, but taking a few moments in planning "what am I going to do if this doesn't work?" is usually worth your time.