It happened at the start of the last period of the day. I had just told the students to click on the link to my activity on my website and........nothing.
And then I saw each screen light up with the same white-boxed message. The screen that says the internet is broken and no one knows when it will be back up. It was like lights at Christmas, only a Christmas that really sucks.
My co-teacher and I looked at each with panicky looks, both of us kicking ourselves for not having our activity completely on paper as a backup (our school has been having intermittent internet issues, so we really should have known better). He grabbed what we did have on paper and started to review it with the students, while I ran across the hall to try to phone IT and see what was up.
There was no answer.
When I walked back into the room, my wonderful co-teacher was almost finished with what we had. My eyes darted around the room, my mind kicking myself for not having a low-tech backup lesson planned, and whirling with one question: "What the HECK (only I didn't think "heck") are we gonna do?"
As my eyes fell upon the stack of Physical Science textbooks in the back of the room, my mind started to connect things together, with clicks that were almost audible. "Books. Have words. Our activity focused on words. Vocabulary, I think it's called. We could do vocabulary. With words. And books. We could do that thing with the chart I like." And the idea to use a Partner Knowledge Rater + (see the document below) and a brand new lesson plan was born. I sprang over to the whiteboard and began just as my partner in science crime finished reviewing his handout.
While the Partner Knowledge Rater is billed as a vocabulary activity, it is really an activating prior knowledge activity that happens to deal with vocabulary. It is a quick and easy way to see what students know about the critical vocabulary words needed for successful mastery of skills/objectives, and builds the foundation upon which students can place concepts and ideas surrounding these words during later learning.
So, while our students cozied up to some science inquiry terms, what lessons did this internet outage hold for the adults in the room? Obviously, the first one is to always have some sort of back-up for your lesson, especially if you know the internet has been invaded by gremlins as of late. We dropped the ball on that one, and it's not going to happen again.
More importantly, we let the learning continue. Just because our primary means of instruction failed (and, if you're using technology, it's a matter of when, not if, it will fail) doesn't mean the learning stopped dead in its tracks. For some reason, some teachers who use technology feel that it should work--all the time. And, if it doesn't work, then they will wait with their students doing nothing, wasting valuable learning time. That just doesn't cut it with me; I only have 50 minutes a day with these guys and gals, so I don't want to waste a single minute--internet outage be damned.
The document below was taken from this book, which is filled with lots more reading strategy goodness. Check it out.