Teacher Bytes

Anyone who as been around educational technology or even technology can identify with this famous line from To A Mouse by Scottish poet Robert Burns, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.” Yesterday was such as day as my attempt to produce a live webcast crashed and burned, with the principal as a witness.

The failure was not from a lack of planning. The student assigned to host the show did her background research to come up with questions she was going to ask. She even sat down with the principal to go over what was going to happen. Failure did not come from a lack of preparation either. The day before, I set up the laptop and webcam I was going to use. I logged onto the website, uStream.tv, and did a test broadcast. Invitations where sent to people in the school, some people at the district office, and friends from the Twitterverse. Everything worked better than I expected as reports came back of being able to see the video and hear the audio. I was feeling pretty good about the webcast the next day.

Everything went wrong when the appointed time came. The laptop was slow to log into the network, never a good sign. The uStream website continued to freeze up and crash several times. There was one time I was able to get good audio but no video. All this was happening with 13 hyper people, 12 students and 1 principal, buzzing around me asking what was wrong. Eventually, I had to admit defeat because time was running out of class but vowed to fight another day. Later, I was able to get everything working but the webcam. It was doing all kinds of crazy zoom ins and outs.

Another attempt at the live webcast will be made next week but with the Girls Basketball Coach as the guest. I would say that would be less pressure but her team just entered Perfectville with a 14-0 record and a conference championship. I am sure she will expect perfection next week from us. However, this weekend I think I will sit down with a mouse, eat some cheese, and try to figure out where things went astray.