No Internet

We lost the Internet at school yesterday for about 3 1/2 periods.  It was definitely interesting since my school is in a one-on-one model.

Second period my Spanish II went to work on researching their Costa Rica projects when the crash happened.  My first back-up plan was to pass back a set of quizzes and have them work on test corrections.  Then I remembered that the sophomores had Chromebooks which meant all their notes were in Google docs--on the cloud which is unaccessible without Internet.  So I went to Plan C and pulled out a bunch of magazines I had brought with me from Maryland--which I left in 2011.  I did not have a class set of any of these magazines written for Spanish learners, but I made sure kids were broken up into small groups of 3-4 with the same magazine.  I asked them just to take notes on what they understood.  It might not have been the most useful lesson, but with needing to come up with a completely different lesson on the fly with no electronic resources, I think I did pretty well :)

Spanish III luckily was reading a novel.  Unfortunately, I had created a Prezi of visuals to go with the chapter, so they didn't get that input.  I mitigated damage by putting them in pairs with whiteboards.  As they read, they wrote words they couldn't figure out on their boards and held them up.  I then gave them clues to figure out the words or else directed them to another pair of students who had recently asked me for that word.

Spanish I had also been planned with on-line activities but Thursday's lessons were not Internet-reliant, so I switched the days.  Thankfully the game is one that I've re-used from other years so I had enough copies in a folder in the room.  With the Internet done, I didn't have any ability to print.

It was interesting to note how integral the Internet has become to daily life in the classroom.  It was also interesting to see how students adjusted since a number of them had also lost the Internet from the phones (a cell tower had gone down).  Some of them were cranky, some a bit lost especially in study hall where even though I only allow phones to be used for schoolwork, I know they're sneaking peeks at other sites.  However, I adjusted lessons to keep the learning going and they settled down to do the work.  We survived :)