uuggh...

You know you have become dependent on technology when your projector bulb burns out at 9am and the first thought in your mind is, "Oh crud, how am I going to teach math? do my word sort, and intro the science lesson?" Last year when my bulb blew, I was fine waiting until the next day for technology to come over and replace it, in fact I think if I had to wait for 2 days I would have been ok. Today however, I was in panic mode, God forbid I had to intro this week's sort low tech, well actually, no tech and if that wasn't bad enough I was totally in a panic on what I would do for math as all of my lessons are now on the SMARTboard.  I am fortunate that our district technology department is located on our campus and one of our awesome techs came over on his lunch hour to replace the bulb so we were up and running again for the afternoon, but seriously, what if ...

It was an eye opening experience for sure and one which made me reflect even more on what would have happened if I had been out today and it had happened to a sub. What will I do next year as a model technology classroom when I need to be out? Technology is supposed to make learning more engaging and easier in my opinion (although substitute teachers don't always think so). What kind of a day will I need to leave for my students?  Just the few hours we were without our projector today were enough for me to realize how much my students have come to expect this type of learning/engagement.

I would imagine that as we become more and more dependent on technology we will have many issues such as we ran into today that we will require us to be problem solvers of a different type.

All I can say is,
"If you're reading this Ken, THANK YOU! I definitely owe you ice cream now!"