Sight Project--Day Three

I think yesterday might have been one of the most hectic in classroom days I've had in a while. It just felt like everything that could go wrong did. But really, it was only one class out of three.

The first and third classes went fine. There were a few issues here and there, but nothing major. The middle class was a nightmare.

In all of the classes, the students were left to their own devices to continue working on the project. The teacher went back on her plan and told them at the beginning of class they would have one more day to finish. This hurt the hoped for sense of urgency. But, students still did work continuously for the most part. Some wasted valuable class time trying to edit music to add to the stories. Some who did not construct a good plan were still hunting up images. But most kids were working on editing and arranging images. A few tried out recording themselves, but very few had anything keepable by the end of class.

The middle class had its fair share of problems throughout. An inexplicably high number of students had to keep restarting because they could not connect to their student drives. This took up a lot of valuable work time. Then, several students were having trouble saving their work. It didn't take me long to realize it was students who had imported images straight from memory sticks or jump drives. The easy fix was to make sure the sources was in the computer before saving, so the file could be accessed. However, this was a problem for students who used multiple memory sticks--since only one could be in the computer at a time. I had to have kids drag and drop the images to a folder in their personal drive, delete the images, and then reimport them. This was horrible, because I had to walk each kid through it one by one. It was one of those days when it seems that the students just didn't have the ability to follow directions without me over their shoulders. And I was sympathetic. I think for most people this would be considered a complicated problem.

To make matters even worse, at the end of class, some students suddenly lost their network connections and couldn't save to their student drives. Once again I attempted to give general directions for this: save to your desktop, restart, move to your personal drive. But, I kept getting students raising their hands with the same question. I was becoming frustrated with the technology, my inability to effectively address all of the students at once (students who didn't yet realize they had this problem were still working and not paying any attention despite my telling everyone that I had something very important to say), and the impatience of students who seemed to think they took precidence over someone I was already helping because they were suddenly having problems, too. Massive problems in the last five minutes of class are exponentially more frustrating than massive problems at any other time.

Needless to say, I started the last class of the day explaining, once again, to save frequently. Saving frequently will not only prevent the loss of ALL work in the case of some failure, but it will also alert students to network issues earlier. I explained that, in the last five minutes of class I would not be able to help everyone, so if everyone had an issue at then end of class, most of them would lose work. It was not the best or most helpful tone to take, and it was largely colored by my multiple frustrations from earlier.

Many students do not have basic trouble shooting, or problem solving skills when it comes to technology. They encounter a problem, and thier first and only reaction is to shout to anyone who knows how to use computers. (I eventually told students that those politely raising their hands would probably get my attention sooner than those shouting my name). They do not have the ability to assess the causes or work through possible solutions to a problem. Quite a few needed help saving to their own jump drives. I'm not entirely sure that they weren't capable of doing it. After all, they had saved images to the drive to bring them to school. But, at school, they only saved to their personal drives. I fear that yesterday, in my frustration, I fell back into the trap of enabling learned helplessness.

I was very focused on technical issues yesterday. My reflection doesn't seem to have anything but them. That's a shame.