Six Standards, That's It

Last Wednesday the Kee Squad group at our middle school taught Google Calendar to all the teachers in the building to incorporate into their new blogs, I think(look at how much I knew what I was doing.  We split the teachers in half: advanced & beginner.

Life got in the way earlier that week and all I had going into that presentation was a list of 6 items to teach.  I thought this would be easy to do and I tried my best to flow with it.  I thought, "All I had to do was go through a list of six things to teach, six standards, that's it."

Within the 10 minutes (I went into this not knowing how much time I would have) I feel like we completed one of those standards.  Maybe I had over scheduled that session, maybe I didn't prepare enough, maybe it was more difficult to teach 25 people SIX things in 10 minutes than I thought.  What ever it was I felt like I crashed and burned while my co-pilot was dead in the passenger seat.

I had planned on doing live demonstrations on the projector step-by-step while they followed along on their laptops.  I had planned on letting them explore that for a minute or two before we moved onto the next.  The two times I attempted to do live demos on sharing a calendar and subscribing to a calendar the page wouldn't load, the dongle came unplugged three random times in the presentation and the ELMO wasn't even set-up yet.
After I fiddled around for 5 minutes we got into Calendar labs. Everyone turned on event bling and I individually helped people.  That one thing was finally going so good I thought I could bring this crashing jet back on track when my ten minutes (that I never knew I had) were magically up and 25 people were out of sight in 30 seconds.

What I learned from this is that live demonstrations barely ever work when trying to do them with a crowd, screen shots are the way to go.  Coming right in and getting right to the point without daddling will give me more time to teach.  The projector needs to be set-up and turned on before everyone comes into the room.  Next week I get a chance to repent my sins.  I have an attack plan and only five standards to cover this time with about 15 minutes.  I now have a new understanding for teachers having to make these lesson plans daily and having to teach it six times a day, all though I would rather do that than have to do the work.