Well golly, here it is May already! I guess I wasn’t ready to have WC! come to an end so soon. I’d like to thank the administration for an awesome pro dev opportunity and Jamie, of course, for making the experience totally worthwhile; I learned a lot.

Today I took a PowerPoint presentation I had been using and turned it into a Photostory media file, complete with some catchy little harpsichord thing in the background, in a little less than an hour. I get to show it to the class tomorrow!

I’ve been reflecting on my technology integration experience and, for what it’s worth, thought I’d share a few of my thoughts on the process. First off, we are pioneers in uncharted territory, and inadvertently, troubleshooters discovering surprises.

Not only does Murphy’s Law apply here but O’Reilly’s Corollary as well. O’Reilly was even more pessimistic: “If things can go right, they’ll eventually go wrong anyway.” Flexibility, above all, is required. A little humor doesn’t hurt either.

We were all told in grad school, I’m sure, not to teach a lesson unless we’d done the lesson ourselves. That was sound advice; something I’ve remembered all these years. Now consider the number of variables involved in implementing a technology lesson. Just because you’ve created the product on your sweet little laptop with your privileged teacher log-in doesn’t mean your students can do the same thing in the computer lab with their level of network access. Get to know your Tech Assistant and the district’s Tech Integration Specialist; we are blessed to have them near. Show them your lesson plan and tell them what you are trying to do. The more you can articulate what you think your process will be, the keener their perspective will be in assisting you.

I was serious about doing the lesson yourself, in the lab, exactly like the students would be doing it. If you are creating multimedia pieces, test the process and the equipment before the students do. All machines and their devices are not created equal. If the headsets plug into the back of the hard drive and you’re not willing to crawl around on the floor doing hookups, you might want to think twice about that lab or that lesson. Students who said they knew what they were doing wound up unplugging the mouse, and everything else except the speaker cable. Do you know where all the settings and adjustments for recording and playback are? Can it be that all 24 students are now deaf or hard of hearing? If there are 24 headsets, 22 of them will need an adjustment, and the TA can’t do everything for you. Yes, you can train students to do these tasks; just add extra time to your lesson. Technology does change the way we teach, and the way we must plan. I’d like to add my own corollary to the universal axiom of “Technology’s great when it works.” Technology’s great when you know how to make it work for you.