Well, this week I got a good lesson in the necessity of planning ample time for anything new in the classroom -- especially unfamiliar technology!

Eager to bolster participation and excitement with a new, unenthusiastic group of 10th graders, I decided to add some pizzazz to an upcoming lesson with new technology. Since I'm introducing a text, I thought a word cloud created with  wordle would be an ideal way to ignite conversation and interest in the text.

The first obstacle I encountered was downloading java and reconfiguring the security settings on my brand-new computer, which I did with considerable trepidation, and only after consulting with my husband the engineer. :-) Then, thinking I'd be savvy, I typed in an extremely brief text to try out the tool. After a lengthy wait, it worked. Okay, I thought, I can type in the text I want to use. Well, after typing for quite a bit and pressing the "create" button, I sat and waited. I eventually realized that the program had crashed my Explorer. Undaunted, I tried again, this time copying the text with control C before pressing "create."  Explorer crashed again. Okay, I thought, Wordle isn't doing it for me. I'll just paste the text into Tagxedo. It will probably come as no surprise to anyone reading that the control V didn't work. I'm not sure where in the ether the text disappeared to, but it did disappear. Not one to give up on the idea so easily, I retyped the text into the Tagxedo application. It too crashed my Explorer.

I'm still trying to think of something to excite my 10th graders, but at that point in the process, I decided to abandon the word cloud idea and create a crossword puzzle for my weak 9th graders. Thank G-d, that worked without a hitch, although I had a bit of experimenting to do in order to copy and paste the crossword puzzle file which I had saved as a .pdf.

Apart from learning this week that new technology takes time to learn and does not always work the way it's intended to, I learned that I definitely have to try things-- programs, web sites, applications -- out on my own before I can plan a lesson centered around them!