Plan!!!!

I am a little OCD.  I admit it.  I try to have a plan for everything.  I am not one of these spontaneous people who can get up and go and have a wonderful time doing it.  I have to have a plan first.  How long will it take to get there?  Where will I stop along the way?  What will I do during each scheduled second of the activity?  Getting a little glimpse of my world?

But this mindset turned out to be very beneficial during my transition to a paperless classroom.  I had a plan for just about every scenario that happened during the day.  I think this is what helped me to keep my head above water.  I planned for it.  Now, I am not suggesting that if this is something that you would like to try that you plan out every contingency, but a bit of proper planning is a must for success.

Here are some of the things I planned for ahead of the first day of school that helped tremendously during the year:

1. I numbered everything.  I am a math teacher so we use calculators in my room.  I learned a long time ago to number my calculators and every student gets the same calculator everyday.  Makes them a little more accountable for them.  I figured, why not use this for the computers as well?  So I arranged my desks in groups of three (I learned a long time ago that more than three desks grouped together is just asking for trouble.)  Then I numbered the desks.  Each child is assigned a number.  That is the desk they sit at, the calculator they use, and the computer assigned to them.  If I had to move a student around (and you know it will happen) the computer stays and they just use the new computer at their new seat.  We are all on the Cloud anyway, so this was not a big deal.
2. I also used a Blended classroom model this year (more info about that in an upcoming post).  I had a plan for students who could not access technology at home so they were not left behind.
3. I had a list of consequences for certain behavior infractions that involved the computers.  These consequences progressively got steeper and steeper for those kids who were a little harder and catching on the first time (or the second, or the third ....).
4. Have a contingency plan for those days where the internet or the network goes down.  This will happen.  It is not fun, but I had planned for it so the day was not a complete disaster and we were able to continue with flow of the class.
5. Know your equipment!!  This is one of the most important pieces of advice I can give.  I bought myself one of the computers that my students were going to use and I learned it inside and out the summer before the school year started.  This way, I could fix anything that a student did (purposely or not) to the computer without having to call in the experts.  This showed my students that I was knowledgeable enough about the equipment that they could not pull one over on me.  
6. Check your machines.  Look at the history. See what got saved to the hard drive.  Be vigilant with your monitoring of students on technology.
7. Have a list of rules that must be followed regarding technology use and be consistent with it!!

Hopefully, this will at least get you thinking about how to use your technology in your classroom.