Darn the tech ... a wee warning for my GTP students

Last time a group of GTP students came for some training the school network failed. I wrote about it here. It was a good lesson in about tech failures. I now have another lesson!

Picture from http://chennai.olx.in 

Last week my new (8 week old) laptop died. This is the third time a laptop has died on me (not counting the one I dropped a book on and smashed the screen). The mini lecture I received this morning from an ICT chap was not helpful. He must have repeated reasons why I should back up regularly about 5 times in the space of 5 minutes. This put my back up. I bit my tongue, switched off and politely said thank you when he had got to the end of his reprimand. I could have told him that most of my important stuff is stored online now, but to be honest I couldn't be arsed to have a conversation.

I feel mildly frustrated that some IWB resources that I had prepared for the students has been lost, but it's not the end of the world. My digital leaders want to be involved in helping the students with smart and promethean boards. Fortunately I had created a document in drive with ICT resources, which would also show the benefits of collaboration through gdocs, and of course this hasn't been lost. These are good teaching points.

I like writing my plans, it suits my thought processes . I'm not sure why it is different to writing on the computer, but it is. I have tried using popplet to create plans similar to my written ones, but can't sustain them and they are harder to annotate. If my plans are for me, then I have decided that it doesn't matter that they are written anyway. So now the only computer based ones are my maths plans and weekly overviews. My mantle planning could not be followed by anyone else (though people are always welcome to look at it), so there is no point storing it on our school network. I can be quite minimalist with my plans and think that planning to far ahead is counter-productive, especially for maths. I often end up adding resources and ideas retrospectively, but I rarely return to them so am unsure why I do this.

ICT has undergone a significant change in schools. It is no longer seen as a discrete lesson, but more as a tool to support learning. We make choices every day about the best tools for the job and how we should not just be using tech for the sake of it, so surely this is the same for our planning?