I was really excited this weekend about getting the students started on their Tech Packets.  I had them all ready to go (well, the Edmodo Scavenger Hunt ready, that is) and was anxious to get it started.  The plan for today was to review the FITCH procedures (thank you, Crystal Kirch!), hand out the worksheet they would be using as a checklist, and then log into edmodo and get started on the scavenger hunt.

I should know by now things never go as planned.

I could tell it was going to be a Manic Monday right off the bat when I logged into my school laptop and went to go pull up the checklist to print off.  My laptop told me it wasn’t happening.  For some reason, I could save it to my desktop and the computer realized it was there, but when I tried to open it, an error popped up telling me it couldn’t be opened.  After my panic mode, I uploaded it into my Google Drive, then printed it off from there.  After another 5 minutes of trying to figure out why my printer wasn’t showing on my laptop, I was able to print off my sheets.  That was a good 15 minutes wasted on just getting my document printed.  Once that happened, though, I breathed a sigh of relief and felt ok about everything once again and knew it was going to be ok.

Wrong-ola.

Before I get into that whole fiasco, let me explain something I used for their warm up today for the first time.  Their first objective was to finish their Science homework from the day before.  I had two students work on that.  For the rest of the class, I had them go to Wonderopolis and use that as their writing prompt.  If you’ve never used Wonderopolis before, I highly recommend it.  Again, I have learning disabled 8th graders who often struggle with writing and lack the motivation to do it.  Wonderopolis  provides a daily question (different every day) with a video, which gets students to think about the topic and then answer it in their journals.  The videos are short and while they range from a wide variety of topics, it helps the students acquire some background knowledge for future use.  Those students who went onto the site seemed to take it in well.

A student using FITCH procedures correctly while watching a video and writing about the given Wonderopolis prompt about wild horses.

Well, we did end up going over FITCH procedures and I explained to them what we were doing.  I even showed them the PowToons video I created to intro the Tech Packets.  You can see that here.  The plus side of that was the kids really seemed to enjoy the video clip, especially when they saw my avatar.  It was a good way to get them motivated about their objective, which was to familiarize themselves with all the edmodo components.  They clicked on the link……..and nothing.

All of their laptops displayed an error that said Internet Explorer was not up to date.  Son of a *****.  I don’t know why I thought the laptops would work fine being that they were district laptops.  If anything, that itself should’ve been the red flag. I was beyond upset, but tried to maintain with the students still in the classroom.  Finally, I told them to just keep their laptops as-is so I could go around after they left class and update their internet for them.  As soon as they left, two things happened: 1. a slew of curse words may or may not have flown out of my mouth and 2. I had a “duh” moment.  They could watch the Scavenger Hunt video playlist on their iPads and do the actual tasks on their laptops.  Problem solved.  For now.  Tomorrow’s another day.  I hope to God things go a little more smoothly tomorrow.  It seems as if it’s just one thing after another going wrong.  I felt as if I had this great idea mapped out just right and that my students’ grades/motivation increase because of it.  But it’s almost impossible for the students to get into the whole storyline/game if the technology doesn’t work.  Everything is based on technology. Again, very frustrating.  Please keep your fingers crossed that tomorrow goes well.  I need all the luck I can get at this point…