Fighting that Wifi Battle

I love technology. I also hate it. Some days it works perfectly and others it is a mess. Right now I'm balancing my emotions between loving and hating technology because the wifi in my room and some of the iPads are just not working well.

Instead of just complaining about it, I'd rather share how I'm dealing with it so that perhaps I can help someone out there experiencing the pains of technology integration when the technology isn't your friend.

For one, I'm doing lots of partner work. "Oh, your iPad isn't connecting. Well you can work with your shoulder partner to do this Kahoot collaboratively." Or "I'm sorry that your iPad can't load Zearn, today you'll work with this student to complete the math lesson." In these instances I'd rather all iPads work, but I'm having some unexpected accomplishments. In the instance where Zearn wouldn't load I matched up people or they matched themselves up and the conversations I heard over the math were pretty impressive. I had one girl who really didn't want to work with her shoulder partner, but I told her to look at it as a tutoring opportunity and the two of them took off and did an amazing job. Her partner probably learned more from her and that video than he did during my entire whole group lesson. When they did Kahoots collaboratively, I had all of my students have to complete their work on their white boards before they could answer and those partners could check each other's work. It ended up being really effective.

Don't get me wrong, I still want the internet to stop hating me, however at least I'm seeing some positives too. Sometimes as a teacher you just have to be able to roll with the punches and that's what I've been doing. Collaboration is a great thing and my students are benefiting despite their technology not being 100%. I'd call that a win in my book.