Tools that work!

My warcry!

I always have claimed I wanted that for the children, but I'd like it too. Over the hols an airport had decided to misbehave, for no apparent reason, and with the afternoon planned for online activity of various sorts, couldn't get online! Jumped through fiery hoops and then switched the whole lot off...airport and all. And after 45 mins of effort....put it back on reselected and rejoined the network, on 11 machines ...et voila! Just in time to shut down. Now can you imagine the kind of chaos that might have been in some classrooms....I had other things for the children to do...but that was our timetabled ibook, blogging time....gone.
Today....having reinstalled the Software for the promethean board, to work with 10.4.5.....It appeared to do so...on one of the machines I use...but it won't on the other....dumped and reinstalled and again.....still won't on the other. Latest version and updates! Well, on the machine that will open the activities...it won't retain the relationship with the activote pods that we had so loved...Had to get them to recognise twice....still wouldn't retain when an activity was opened. ...so had to revert to an older slug of a machine to make use of the mental arith this morning, and couldn't use the pods for ad hoc stuff on the website we were to explore, since the machine didn't have Flash8 that was needed...to navigate and make full use of!
Think how much worse this is for a less confident teacher....with a difficult class....who knows less about the system.....who was doing this for the first time....
I'm a busy class teacher...this I could do without too....and my class deserve better. I compliment them constantly on their patience. so they now make a thing about displaying it.....but I want to SCreeeeeeeeeem!!! So we didn't get time to record their fab stories...I said I was sorry about that....and one wee soul said....That's OK. We'll do it tomorrow. Oh the confidence of youth!