I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has ever had extreme frustrations with technology. This evening, I was supposed to do a show and tell activity with my ECMP 455 class in Elluminate. I spent the last few daysday attempting to make my presentation interesting and making the slides appealing, and was even tweaking it until a few minutes before the class began. I sat through the first few presentations from my classmates, they were very good, one about art and the other about computers. In Mike’s computer presentation, I added in the I have really liked how Windows 7 (my current operating system) has worked for me.
Then it came time for me to share my presentation. I went to click the button that would give me the mic to begin my presentation. Everything freezes up. Uh oh. Quickly restart, try again. Frozen. Great. I repeated this process for an hour while my class went on without me. Eventually the time came where everyone else had completed their presentations and my computer still hadn’t started to work.
This was extremely frustrating for myself. I spent the next hour Googling possible reasons as to why this might have happened. Everywhere seemed to have the same solutions, which must have worked for others, but not for me. Eventually I just uninstalled a bunch of programs and reinstalled some. Ta-da! Just like that, everything started running smoothly again.
This isn’t the first time my computer or a piece of technology has buckled under pressure for me. It seems that whenever I need it to work, it refuses.
I have great plans to incorporate technology into my teachings and my classroom in the future. When problems like this occur, it makes me worry somewhat about how using technology in my classroom will go. What if every time I go to use it, it crashes or doesn’t work as planned?
I don’t have very much experience in a classroom as of right now. In my field placement for this semester, I am planning to utilize and test out the SmartBoard in the classroom. I know last semester, I ran into quite a few problems work with Ms. Ionno in my mentorship. I understand that I will have to have a plan B when I start using it. I am sure this is why many teachers are so reluctant to embrace and use technology in their classrooms.
How has using technology worked for you? Any horror stories to share? How did you handle it?
Wow,
I can just feel your frustration oozing out of my computer screen! I hear you though. Technological difficulties are the worst! Especially, of course, exactly at the moment you need it the most. That seems to happen more than one would like to admit. I guess the only thing we can really do is try out our presentation earlier in the day and hope for the best! Hopefully you will get to teach another night!
Been there, done that!!! This is why as you said you always need a plan B. Being a veteran teacher, I have tons of experience teaching without technology so when it does fail I can go back to teaching like I did in the “good old days”.
However, for you new educators it may be hard revert to teaching the old fashioned way when the tech fails. Your students will not be sympathetic if things go wrong.
Will you still be able to give your presentation to your class?
Hi Kyle! I am not sure if you were on the elluminate when I presented but I had some technical issues too! I was originally going to use powerpoint until my transitions got in the way. I had to screenshare so that I could show my presentation the way that I set it up. Unfortunately I could not download the screenshare option and had to log out and back in too. It took quite a while for me to get set up to present and ended up not being able to communicate in the chat because I could not see the chat box.
One of the elluminating classes my mic would not work and today while Skyping with my mentor I had issues trying to answer the call. I have never had an issue with Skype before. I figured out that having my webcam open interfered with our skype call. It was not long until it was all figured out and we were skyping.
I try not to let it get me down. Dean was very patient making me feel calm trying to figure it all out and Keith and I worked together until we were up and running. If all else fails I would have tried another day.
I am looking forward to hearing about your passion and what happened last night will not change my perception of your presentation 🙂 When are you going to present now? Let me know and I will sign in and watch!
~Karie~
I will be presenting in the session tonight. I’m sure my computer will find a new, creative way to wreck that for me. Only time will tell.
Danielle, the frustrating thing about this, was that I had tested out my microphone earlier that day. I didn’t get the chance to test it out in Elluminate, maybe I could have fixed this earlier had I had the chance to do that.
Jackie, I hope I can develop the skill to improvise if need be and I’ll continue to look to teachers like yourself to learn how to teach like they did in the “good old days”. I hope this isn’t something I will have to learn the hard way over time.
Karie (not Kare, Haha, I fixed the comment), it’s nice to hear I’m not the only one who has had troubles with this. You are lucky that you were able to figure it out that night and present it. Dean was very understanding and kept trying to help out and even tweeted out for some help. I hope you enjoy the presentation tonight!