Woosah…

This pretty much sums up my day.  How many times can things go wrong? Let me count the ways…

Again, let me start at the beginning and what was SUPPOSED to happen.  They were going to come in, grab their laptops, and I was going to guide them in bookmarking the websites we will be using the most this year.  It started off fine, until two of the laptops froze.  The students had to shut down and get two other laptops from the cart.  And of course, the login process took forever.  Then we got to the Tech Packets, which was embedded as a MentorMob playlist on Edmodo.  For some *expletive* reason, it gave the students an error telling them that the videos were not available.  One student could view them.  The rest couldn’t.  As I went from student to student, trying to figure out what was going on, I finally told them to watch it on their laptops.  Of course, Internet Explorer didn’t update properly on all of them, regardless of me trying to update them the day before.  As a last resort, I directed them to YouTube on their iPads and searched for “Edmodo Scavenger Hunt”.  That worked, but the videos were in jumbled order, so once they finished a video, they had to go back and search for the next numbered video, and hit play.

Then the kids were confused because we were looking at the revamped version of Edmodo and the tutorial videos were recorded with the old version. To top it all off, one of my student’s laptops just randomly logged him out completely out of the blue, so he had to log back in, wait for the whole startup time, then log back into Edmodo, then re-play the video.

What. A. Mess.

Conclusions: 1.The school laptops suck. 2. The MentorMob playlist won’t work; I’ll have to create YouTube playlists. 3. We may have to skip some of the Scavenger Hunt steps since it’s taking forever to move just a skosh. 4. Next year, I will need to create my own, condensed version of the Scavenger Hunt.  In that order.  I’m worried that the constant tech issues/problems are frustrating the students and if they lose motivation, their buy-in is gone.

But wait! My day gets better!*

One of my students decided he didn’t want to do anything today and grew agitated from the fact that I had the audacity to ask him to work.  So I was the lucky recipient of his verbal insults and assurances that he wasn’t going to do jack for me ever. It was a consistent flow of annoyances done purposely to get under my skin until he became so disruptive in class that I had to call security to have him escorted out.  Wonderful. Thank God I downloaded the Pocket Pond app for stress relief purposes.  I love my job, I love my job, I love my job…..

Woosah.

*by better I mean exponentially worse