The day and age of the 21st century has brought us an abundant reliability on technology. Within the classrooms, technology is often a gift no matter how minute or small it may seem. Having an ELMO and a projector might not seem like much to some schools who have iPads, but to a school that doesn’t have such luxuries it can make a big difference. Although technology can be a blessing, it can also be a hindrance when it goes awry. If a teacher is unable to be flexible when cases like this happens it can cause unnecessary anxiety.

Within my classroom, my CT uses the ELMO quite frequently. She uses it for science, math, and social studies every day. Since I have been in her class, I have never observed this technology not working for her. There was one time that the power went, out while it was raining, during a math lesson. She instructed me to write on the white board and she wrote on the board as well. The only other times I have seen her write on the front white board is for doing tally marks for table points. Although I haven’t seen her write on the front white board much, she has a white board on her easel in front  of the carpet that she uses every day. She uses this white board easel to model sentences during ELA time, write words that begin with a certain letter, etc. I believe that she uses this board much more because the majority of her class is centered around being on the carpet. Since the kids are on the carpet for most of the lessons using that board would be more appropriate that using the front white board.

During this past week, my CT has had to take half days both Tuesday and Wednesday due to personal reasons. She instructed in her sub lessons to “let my intern do as much as she can”. Both subs obliged happily to give me the majority of control. During the math lesson on Tuesday, for some reason half way through the projector turns off. I tried pushing the power button a couple of times, but instead of getting stressed out,  I did the first thing that came to my mind: use the white board. I jumped up right away and started using the white board to write numbers and draw images to keep the normal pace of the lesson. I walked around as well so that I could see if the students were able to follow along with me even though they weren’t able to physically see me filling out the page on the ELMO. They did great! After the math lesson came social studies, which again normally requires a projector. Instead of showing the students under the ELMO how to cut and place the pictures of community helpers into their notebooks, I thoroughly explained it to them while holding up the pictures in the front of the class. During this lesson, the students were to tell me what tools the community helpers needed, and I would draw a picture of the tool and write the word (with their help) under the image of the corresponding community helper. While the students were cutting out the pictures, I used that time to write each of the community helper names on the board very large. The lesson went on how it normally would, but instead of drawing and writing on a notebook, I drew and wrote on the board. The students seemed slightly more engaged then they normally are which I thought was interesting. This could be because the deviance form the normal routine, but I’m not sure.

After completing this task–not necessarily planned–I learned a lot about being flexible and resourceful. When I first began teaching, if something didn’t go right I would get stressed out. I would be so concerned with the fact that something isn’t going as planned, that the long term picture of time wasted would be blurry to me. I’ve seen how important it is to be able to take impromptu opportunities to teach students something or to take a deep breath and laugh at yourself. Teaching to me shouldn’t be such a stressful and anxiety filled job. If it is, students can sense that tension and it doesn’t make for a good learning community. That all being said, sometimes technology doesn’t work and that’s okay. Just move on and use your other resources.