Backing Up Your Backup Plan

How’s it going? Hope everyone is having a great school-week so far. It’s almost Friday and I  can’t wait! Gosh, I am so super teacher-tired!

This week has gone well really and there’s nothing much to report except that my laptop almost did the unthinkable on Tuesday morning, sending me into a state of panic because I had no back-up plan!

In fairness to my faithful, soon-to-be 5 years old Samsung laptop, it has been showing signs of tiredness but I’ve been coaxing and urging it to take one more step because I’m not ready for a new one yet. But on Tuesday morning when I got to school and tried to turn it on in preparation for my four back to back lessons which I had from first till 4th period, it just didn’t come on. Instead, I got an error message that the system was “scanning and repairing Drive C” and this was about 25 minutes before the start of class. After what seemed like forever, it finally rebooted just about 5 minutes before class time. Phew!

At that moment, I was reminded of the importance of having a plan B. I mean, technology is great and often 99.999% reliable but you never can tell when the 0.0001% error will show up. It goes without saying that you should always have a backup plan as a teacher.

To be honest with you, I haven’t learned my lesson yet. I still haven’t created back-ups since Tuesday because the laptop has been working perfectly after that episode LOL but maybe next week I will! So, my plan is to upload my slides and materials for each week on Google drive so I can access them from anywhere if something goes wrong. I could also back up my back-up plan by printing out hard copies of slides and materials but that would mean having a lot of paper to throw away after a while. Anyways we’ll see.

Do you use technology in your classroom? If you do, how do you back up your plans for the times when technology acts up?   

This has got to be the most boring post ever but I’m glad you made it up to this point.

Thanks for stopping by, see you next post!