Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Monday 22 December 2014

Recycled From Facebook: The Return of the Mini-Rant

Part I
After weeks of being asked by my school to use the computers I wrote a computer lesson for this week. Halfway into the first lesson of the day (with four to go) there was a power failure at the school which means it will now be off for at least the rest of the day.
This is why I don't write computer lessons. And that's what I will tell them next time they try to insist. (I did have a plan B!)

I learned my lesson on this back in England when the college I taught at decided to replace all the whiteboards with smartboards and then had the lot break down leaving all the classrooms with literally nowhere to write anything. In classroom situations I firmly believe the lower tech the better.

Part II
More reasons NOT to put computers in classrooms.
My classrooms all have computers that project onto retractable screens which raise or lower in front of the whiteboards. I've mentioned before the problems with preparing detailed whiz-bang computer lessons only to arrive and find the computer isn't working or there has been a power failure. This week I had another problem. My lesson has no computer content but three times out of thirteen lessons (so far) I've arrived in class to find the retractable screens broken and stuck in the down position. This has meant teaching without a board to write on as the board has been wholly covered by the screen which I can't write on. From now I'll always have a "no materials/no board" back up plan too. Computers in classrooms seem superficially to be a good idea but in my experience they are more trouble than they are worth. To quote Scotty from Star Trek, "The more you complicate the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the drains."