Of course it is! Is it going to be trouble? Of course it is. I don’t think that there are many days when everything runs smooth as whipped butter. It is inevitable that something on the computer is probably not going to work the way the teacher had planned, and there is always the chance that it might no work at all. Despite this, the benefits will out weigh the bad experiences.
Last semester, I had a lesson planned using Zoho wiki. I tested the program several times (on my own), and as far as I could tell, the lesson was going to run smoothly. It did for the first five minutes, and then it went to pieces like a dish on a hard floor. The lesson wasn’t even salvageable. Turned out that Zoho wiki has a few bugs still, and we learned out first hand what they were.
What to do in a situation like this? I just told the students that it wasn’t going to work, and it was a learning experience for me. I also taught them that that was the joy of using computers. No matter how much I tried to test out the lesson, it didn’t work with that many people using the program. This was something that I could not and would not have learned without their help.
I have had similar experiences since then, but I have also had some great experiences as well where students were able to make great leaps in the learning and creating process. This is the reason for using technology. It is the thing that we have to remember.
Besides, if it was always easy, would teaching really be that much fun?
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