Four things I learned from a week with crummy Internet

The new week is off to a great start primarily because we have had great Internet service at school...last week, not so much. According to our tech consortium, the problem was in some faulty hardware.

Having no Internet may have wreaked havoc on my lesson plans but I did learn a few things.

1. We really have outsourced many parts of our brains as I have heard Kevin Honeycutt mention several times at conference keynotes. Little things like how to correctly spell "discrepancy" were a lot harder to find without the luxury of a few quick key strokes on the web. 


2. Cloud storage is miraculous...when it works. Without access to Google Drive last week at times we were trapped in time. Kids wanted to work on projects but without access to their original documents they had nothing upon which to build. When it was up and running today students seamlessly accessed Google Drive to retrieve, update, and save work.


3. The Internet is an invaluable step forward in human history. Our third graders were researching games children played outdoors and were completely dead in the water without the Web. We were surrounded by books but none had anything to do with pioneer games. Our last resort was the encyclopedia and it offered nothing in the "games" entry or the "pioneer" entry. Had we been writing a report about 2002 Chile, we might have been in business.


4. Children really lack perspective on how it wasn't very long ago that our world did not have instant access to immediate knowledge. As a plan B in a 5th grade class, I did my best to trace the evolution of personal computing, especially in education since Jobs and Woz built the first Apple in the garage. One girl seemed completely befuddled that there was any reason to own a computer prior to the Internet.
   
   "What did you do with it if you couldn't look stuff up? Just play games?"
   
   "Pretty much, " I replied as I looked back at the start of my career where Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, and Carmen San Diego were the pinnacle of integration with a little Bank Street Writer thrown in as differentiation.

The bottom line is that we live in an amazing time and right or wrong we have become dependent on being connected. It was actually good for the kids to experience the outage and maybe not take the connectivity completely for granted. Internet access really has become something we expect as common place as electricity. I am very lucky to teach in a district that has made long term investments in insuring we have great connections and access. I know a lot of teachers and kids aren't so lucky. Hopefully they will be soon.