AVReading

  Robert Burns captured the essence of lesson planning in his line, “Best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men” often go awry.  It is perhaps a little discouraging to think that we spend all of our time planning out these carefully detailed lessons, only to have an unscheduled fire drill at the start of the period, or to lose the computer lab or library space we were hoping to use, or to simply misjudge a 45 minute activity as something we could have done in 10.  Technology, for all its power and glory, usually is the culprit.  Some of my most grandiose plans have been built on some wonderful device or program or website, and in my moment of greatest vulnerability they have let me down.  I remember planning one fun activity with a website where students were asked to video record a short thirty second response to a poem I had posted.  The video recordings would surround the poem on the screen, and students could then view the responses of their ...