A classroom without Moodle

I teach senior IT, and am faced with a session without PCs.  This means no typing, no Internet, and most troubling no Moodle.  Our Careers guys are comendeering my lab for an afternoon, so we have to move on.  To make this just a little more interesting, I will be out on PD on that day.

We had a Moodle dropout last week, (see previous post.)  Stuffed up my whole day.  At least this time I have some warning.

So what are we going to do?  If the class had PCs and Moodle but no Me, no problem.  Write up a quiz or a webquest and away they go.  Would be a dream of an extra class to pick up.  But no Moodle!

I decided, on agreeing to give up my lab, that completing a task on paper is no big deal – the kids have to do this in exams anyway, and it is a good exercise to remind them that they have tobe able to verbalise IT concepts, not just do it on a computer.  It is planning the tasks for the class that is getting me down; no previously posted resources, no scanned textbook pages, no messaging instructions, no clever web2 tools to liase with.  It will have to be a case of read this bit in your text book, now do this.  I am going to have to type up instructions and print them out!  Ughh.

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Well the session has come and gone and the kids coped without Moodle.  I guess that they slipped back into paper and pen mode a lot more easily than I did.  I hear that the students made good use of their session and worked away pretty well at the paper tasks set.

Yet, by the time the next opportunity to deal with the info came around, it seems that most of the students had manage to lose their bits of paper.  I can’t help thinking that with a PC and moodle available, students would have completed the task, saved their work and then uploaded the completed assignment for me to grade.   Perhaps the students had no idea what to do with bits of paper, as I have not done photocopying for IT for years.  Perhaps Moodle and online facilities make students less inclined to be organised with hard copies?

Food for thought.