When Trouble Happens

Today I took my kids to the computer lab to try a new way of exploring their questions. I made a Google Doc that had a table for all their questions. The students were then to go in and write their questions on a blank line. I gave them specific instructions to not go into others' lines. (That has happened before and it becomes a big mess.)

Everything was going great, I had the document on the projector so everyone could see what was happening, and I had the students at their own respective computers. I was thinking, "this is going better than I expected. We will be able to send this out today!"

Then something happened. Just as the Headmaster came in to talk about tomorrow's earthquake drill, someone happened to delete the column with all the questions in it. There was panic followed by groaning. I told them to stop what they were doing and I would try to fix it.

My repeated attempts to use CTL+z failed with Google giving me an error and telling me to reload the page.

There was no time left so I told them that we would do it again tomorrow, but if they wanted to, they could write their questions at home (that's what I love about using Google Docs).

I told them that next time they do something like that [make a big mistake] tell everyone to freeze. "Freeze" is now our code word to stop working on the document so we can fix it.

That was a period used to learn a valuable lesson. 

Tomorrow we will be back at it.