Powers out

One of the main reasons that I am posting to this blog is to let other educators and education stakeholders know what works and what doesn't when using iPads in a typical classroom environment.  To this point most of my posts have been about things that work, however anyone who has spent time in a classroom knows sometimes things don't go as planned.  Which leads me to todays post.

The plan for  class today was to take an assessment on World War II.  I had spent the last two days loading questions, images, and graphic organizers onto my website.  When I had finished uploading the test I set it to open up at 8:00 the following morning.  When my first block class arrived things went as planned all of the student opened up their iPads, pressed the short cut to my website, and logged onto the test.  I have to say that I was quite pleased with the results. As they completed their tests they began to work on an extra credit assignment, creating a  propaganda poster that you would have found in the United States during the war.  At this point I thought it was going to be a cake day.

During my planning things continued to go well.  I was working with one of my para-educators on updating the i-Pads and we were getting rid of pictures that the students had hidden in the photo album section of the machines.  Thats when it happened, the power to the school went out.  Well I should say half of the school.  Apparently an unrelated event a few blocks away involving a car and a telephone pole knocked out power to the school.  Our ancient electrical system was temporarily disabled, but was able to be partially restored.  At first I thought we were going home early, but after thirty minutes or so we got the message that the power would be restored momentarily.  When the power came back up I tried one of the i-Pads to see if it could connect to the network and it did not, so I waited, and waited, and waited.  I began to think to myself that maybe I should have printed a hard copy of the test.  What am I going to do when my third block shows up in fifteen minutes and I don't have anything for them to do?  As I started looking through old lesson plans the network began working again.

To say I was relieved was an understatement and things went on as originally planned for third and fourth block.  Then at the end of fourth block a voice came over the P.A. system and informed us that at 2:00 the power would go out for three minutes.  No problem I thought.  I can have fifth block review notes before the test, talk about our next unit, just stall them for a little bit.  When my fifth block came in I had them take out their notebooks to review for the test.  As two 2:00 turned into 2:15 and the power had not been turned off I began to wonder what I had done to anger the testing gods.  If I rolled the dice and started to take the test the power would go out, but if I continued to stall it would most certainly stay on.  I went with the conservative approach and had the students work on the propaganda posters, but I knew that this activity would not last all block.  At around 2:30 I decided to go ahead and start the test and at 2:50 when most of the students were about half way done with the test, you guessed it the power went out.

Moral of the story:  When giving an online test (i-Pad or computer) always print a hard copy.