Third Lesson

I took my class to lab today with the intention of going back into our slides and editing/revising as several had not finished last week. I wasn't very hopeful when I walked in the lab and saw our technology guru in there with doors that housed the servers wide open. He was sitting at a computer nearby and I sat down and got started with my class. It took several minutes for my homepage to show up. Then it took even longer for the template to load. We waited and waited and waited. This was just my demo! The guru was in a different room so I proceeded and was able to show the kids how to get to the template and finish their writing. This took 8 minutes. It should have been a quick 3 minute lesson. The kids all went to their computers, logged on, and that's when everything was s-l-o-w. No one could even open the template. This is the frustration I was worried about. Apparently, we just got a new part for our server so it would run much smoother. It was installed after my last lab lesson. It's not working. Last week went much better without the new part. After 7 minutes of pages not loading, I instructed the kids to escape and try going to Tux Type and practice keyboarding. Because many are not very fast at typing, the lag time worked for them! The students that were able to click the letters quickly had to sit and wait. Our time was up and we didn't accomplish anything. This is what I feared. It's so inconsistent you can't depend on it from one day to the next.