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Thursday 29 October 2009

The Day the Internet Went Down!

Yesterday upon arriving to school, staff members encountered a school without an internet connection. For some it was  a moment to rejoice, no more email hammering through the system to deal with and no more computer based admin work to be done. Some of us saw it differently, asking ourselves the question, "How on Earth could we function without it?" Now I am not referring to emails and admin, but digital teaching and learning. I teach ICT and let's face most of my lessons are web based, as well as parked on a wiki or Google Doc. It wasn't so much the lack of access to the lessons, but the resources I very carefully park online to use in my teaching, as well as the web applications I am teaching students to use.  Let's face it the Twitter research lesson was going to have to be scrapped!

In the end I opted for having the 8th grade create a story map of sorts, an outline for their upcoming work with Prezi. They actually cheered when I told them the internet was down-go figure. Anyway we pulled some books off the shelves, handed out the paper and they got to it. It was worth it. Each group engaged in a lot of discussion and planning and now has a plan for organising their presentation.

It is not the end of the world when the internet goes down, there are other ways to cope, and other activities which can be done, but my Twitter lesson will still have to take place, even if its a week later, causing a domino effect for all the followup activities-again not the end of the world.

That doesn' t mean I didn't cheer out loud and practically jump out of my chair when Tweetdeck all of a sudden pushed an update through onto my screen.  (You know what? I wasn't the only one!)

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