I love using technology and the web 2.0 tools that I have exposed my students to so far this year. With blogs, VoiceThread, and podcasting already under the belts, I feel that they are already ahead of a number of the fellow students not just at Triton, but at many schools in the area. Maybe I am wrong and overestimating what I am doing with my students, but I really am happy with what we have accomplished so far.
That being said, there is always something that seems to pop up that requires some kind of immediate attention. Whether its upload problems on my part (which has happened at least a couple of times in the past couple of times), download problems on my students' part, or other technical glitches along the way, it always something.
That it why often the most important part of teaching (and the one that is the least often talked about) is the ability to think on our feet and adapting to the situation around us. If the tool that we want to use that day is down or unavailable, we have to have something ready to go beyond popping in a video and calling it a day. It is too easy to blame the IT people and assume that it is their fault. If we are using the technology, we have to be the ones responsible for knowing how it works and what the potential problems will be. It doesn't necessarily mean that new problems won't come up, but it will help us to walk through the problems as they pop up.
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