Speed Bumps

Anytime a new curriculum is launched there are unexpected speed bumps that slow down the process.  The GarageBand project has been fraught with them.

All the student laptops are connected to the StudentShare, an off-site server where students can save files and access them at a later date from any other computer on the network.  It also serves as a back-up should the computers crash or get stolen.  It is a fantastic system but it turns out no other teachers are using the StudentShare this school year.  I realized that the laptops were generally underutilized at our school but I did not know this was the case across all of our other schools as well.  Clearing out the virtual cobwebs and setting up the individual student folders took a bit longer than anticipated.

I finally finished setting up all the folders (with the appropriate permissions since it turned out the folders defaulted to "read-only") and prepared the lesson that would introduce the kids to using the StudentShare.  Of course on the day that I schedule to teach the lesson the server goes down.  We used to have frequent server issues but it had not been a problem all year so it was rather funny that it would go down on the one day that I am teaching kids to access it.

Last Thursday everything was finally up and running and I was able to teach the lesson.  The kids created 24-bar ABA songs, using loops, and saved them to their individual folders on the StudentShare.  The lesson itself went smoothly and about 85% of the class successfully saved their files to the correct folder.

SUCCESS!

This weekend my plan was to listen to each of the files to assess the students understanding of ABA form and their comfort-level with the loops aspect of GarageBand.  I have been foiled yet again as it turns out my ancient employee MacBook is still running GarageBand '09 and the student laptops are running GarageBand '11; my computer will not open their files.

Swell.

I have emailed our technology department to find out if I can upgrade my GarageBand.  If upgrading GarageBand on my work computer is not possible my Plan B is to upgrade my old personal Macbook to Snow Leopard, upgrade my GarageBand '08 to '11 and then begin having the kids save the files to a Dropbox folder so that I can access them from my personal computer.

Needless to say, this has been a frustrating week in GarageBand land.

But I think the biggest frustration of all has been realizing that we have all of this technology at our disposal and it is not being put to good use in our classrooms.  We are currently missing major opportunities to increase the relevance of our students' learning experiences.

UPDATE:
Big props to our IT department for checking email on a Sunday afternoon.  I received a response 30 minutes after making this post.  They will update my computer with iLife '11 if I am willing to drop my computer off at our network office for a day.