Buckland Weekly #8 : Computers

Before I was a teacher I had a whole other career. I worked for over twenty years in I.T. I only mention this because I want to talk about computers in classrooms. It's something I used to rant about occasionally on my other blog. For example here or here or here.

Now my background makes me predisposed to like computers. I often do the quiz in my local bar where my quizzes always have animated powerpoints to accompany the questions. It's marvelous to be able to play music, show movies, have interactive games and do everything else you can do with computers in the classrooms

Almost every classroom here in China, in the big cities anyway, is fitted with a computer and a projector. Some, I am told, have actual smartboards. And I virtually never make any use of it at all.

Why?

Well, before I answer that, let me just pop in a quick disclaimer. More than any post I have made so far under this heading, this should all be treated as my personal opinion only – informed by my experience, but my own opinion nonetheless. You may have entirely different views. And if you do, I say, “Go to it!”

Right.

Why do I rarely use the computers that the schools have helpfully installed everywhere? It's quite simple. In the handful of times I have actually done computer or technology based lessons over the last four years there has never been a single instance where I completed more than two thirds of the classes without needing to go to my non-technology back up plan.

Ah, back up plans. Those of you who have already trained with me will remember that I mention them probably about twenty times a day. It's essential that you have a back up plan whenever you are intending to use any technology at all in class. Even working in England or America it's a mistake to assume that things will work.

Things won't work. That's the nature of technology. It breaks down. The more complicated the technology, the more likely it is to break down. Or to quote Mister Scott in one of the Star Trek movies, “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”

Progress is all very well but even small amounts of progress cause problems.

Hands up anyone who has ever found that writing with chalk on a blackboard suddenly didn't work.

No-one? I'm not surprised.

Now hands up anyone who has got halfway through a class with whiteboards and markers and had to send a student rushing off to another classroom to borrow more markers because all the ones you have are out of ink.

Everyone? Still, not surprised.

And that's a very minor bit of technology.

Computers are so much worse than that. For a start you can't borrow one from another classroom.

Let me tell you about my most recent attempt to use them. A month or so ago my students asked if I could do a music-based lesson with them. I have a music lesson. It's a good one – popular, fun, develops a lot of vocabulary, gets the students expressing opinions. I like it.

It requires me to be able to play short sections of about ten pieces of music in different genres – say about thirty seconds each. In the past when I've done it I have recorded things onto cassette tape and used a big cassette player to play it.*

However at the moment I don't have access to a cassette player to do that. What I have is a lot of MP3 files and a computer. I copied the files onto a flash drive and we were ready to go. You can certainly guess what happened next.

Of the twelve classes that I was intending to give the lesson, five didn't work.

In one we could get the computer working but wasted ten minutes trying to get the speakers to work before I went to plan B.

In another we couldn't get the computer to work at all. It had, the students informed me, been broken all year.

In the third we had a repeat of the non-functioning speakers.

And then there was the classroom where everything seemed to be working but the folder containing the files was invisible to the computer. I have no idea why.

In the last of the five everything was sort of working but the music sounded so horribly distorted that it was painful to listen to.**

My Plan B proved to be rather inadequate as it consisted of playing similar music through my minidisc*** player and a set of tiny speakers that I had taken in for the purpose but which proved to be much too quiet for the classrooms.

We had to stick with Plan B though. I hadn't gone as far as preparing a Plan C.

This is completely typical of my experience with computers in classrooms in China. It even happened often enough when I taught in England that I didn't like relying on them.

So, what can you do?

There are a few things.

If you need the computer to show pictures, have copies of the pictures also printed to hand out if necessary. 

If you need the computer to play music or any other audio, have an alternate source of music to hand.

If you need the computer for any kind of game or to show movies, plan an alternate activity that can be substituted.

If your whole lesson is a powerpoint, have a completely separate non-powerpoint version in you bag, ready to go

Of course all this raises an interesting question. If, when you prepare a computer based lesson, you also HAVE TO prepare a non computer version “just in case” then why not just prepare the non-computer version and halve your effort? Why not, as it were, go straight to the back-up plan.

And that's the answer to why I so rarely use computers. I am sure many of my lessons would be much better on computer but when I know that half the time I will be going to the back-up anyway I figure it's best to just save the time and effort and forget the computer altogether.

Of course, you may love computer lessons to the point where you will use them whatever the difficulties. Or you may feel confident that in your school the technology won't fail you. Great. As I said, go for it. But don't forget that back up anyway. Better safe than sorry.

(*Even the tape recorder version failed once when I got to school and was told the power was going to be off for three days.

** On one particularly memorable occasion, in my first year teaching in China, everything was working except that the student who looked after the key to the lockable computer desk was off sick. No student, no key, no computer.

***Yes, a minidisc. Made obsolete, I know, by the rise of MP3 players and their successors, but I like them!)