Week Eight: The Fine Art of Presentation

Week Eight: The Fine Art of Presentation

One of the first things that any aspiring technologist should realize about technology is that sometimes it doesn't work out very well. This is what our enterprising group discovered on Wednesday, as the presentation we had intended to do was somewhat derailed by the lack of cooperation of the components involved. Fortunately, we were able to negotiate that difficulty somewhat and show everyone the wonder and amazement of Remind101 through a more interactive method, but it would have been nice if things had worked out a little better with the smartboard.

How can you prevent such things from happening in the future? The first thing is to make sure that you are familiar with the technology or application that you are using with your classroom, that you've used it a few times, and if at all possible, with all the specific equipment you will be using in the actual classroom demonstration. If you are intending to hook something up to a Smartboard, do it after class sometime, so you know what to expect. Knowledge is your first and last line of defence.

Secondly, it never hurts to have a backup plan in case something doesn't go right. Perhaps you can scale down what you'd intended to do into a form that would be more viable, or perhaps you can simply do what you'd intended to do in a low-tech form if necessary. Perhaps there's another activity that can keep them busy while you figure out what went wrong. While it's always ideal if your Plan A works out perfectly, you should always be ready to employ a Plan B. We thought of one somewhat on the fly, which worked out all right in the end, but a prepared plan would have been better.

Remind101:

Now that I've discussed several of the potential issues with presenting technology, I'd like to spend some time to briefly discuss Remind101 itself. I think this could be an extremely useful app for classroom purposes, neatly solving some of the most intractable problems of having teacher e-mail addresses and texting numbers in the hands of parents, students or others. It's useful for the teacher to have a service which can instantly send reminders and brief notes to people in defined groups and the confidentiality and inability of others to reply to the messages means that it can stay on task, as a professional tool, rather than a socializing one.

I don't think I would use this with actual students in an Early Years context, though it may be useful with their parents and between teachers. With older kids, it may be a different story, though it would require a certain degree of sensitivity about the nature of the school you were in. In a school in a privileged area, virtually everyone might have a phone that can take advantage of this, in a poorer district, it might be a source of undesired conflict between "have" and "have-not" students. This could be especially tense in an area where there is a mixed demographic (I tend to think of Vincent Massey, which contains some of the richest as well as some of the poorest kids in the city) and some caution may be in order before introducing it to students. It might be easier on something like an extracurricular club or sports team than in a general classroom.

Overall, I thought Remind101 was a useful app and I was happy to show it to the classroom. It's crazy to contemplate this, but my next blog entry will be the course wrapup, where I reflect on some of what has happened in the class, what I have learned, and what I would like to learn more about as I start my second placement of student teaching.