Hooley Dooley! – just about the worst thing that a teacher could imagine for their class has happened to me in the last 24 hours.

Get the class to work in a collaborative, shared space – YEAH! (that is a genuine cheer).

I love the idea of students sharing online spaces and learning digital citizenship behaviours. If you want students to demonstrate mature, responsible, respectful behaviour online, you have to model it and provide opportunities to practice it in an authentic context.

What better opportunity than creating a class Prezi for our upcoming oral presentation task.

The context is simple – create a classroom Prezi, invite all students to join, demonstrate how to create a frame for each student’s independent work, present a whole class presentation to an audience. EASY RIGHT?!?!?

Hmmmm, it would seem there are more hurdles than I was prepared for. I knew students would experiment with adding content that pushed the boundaries of appropriateness (ahhh, who am I kidding, it’s highly probable at least one will leap right over that boundary), and I would address any of these issues as they arose and use it a teaching moment. I was expecting the question about adding their own avatar – no problem, so long as it was an image of themselves and ONLY themselves.

What if they accidently delete an element from the original template? – if it is an accident I will assist to replace the missing background. If it is clearly an purposeful act – you will have to learn how to fix it yourself or live with consequences of a blank canvas

What if someone deletes something of mine? – clearly a behaviour issue that is no different to a student defacing another students property in a classroom and we discussed this as a whole class at the beginning of the unit. I trust the students in the F2F environment and I conveyed my belief that I could trust them in the online space.

So tonight I looked into the progress of the class only to find that it appears the entire content has been deleted. I started to look into how to retrieve that lost work only to find that all the comments seem to be suggesting that it CAN’T be retrieved! I couldn’t understand how the whole space could be deleted if a student was doing the appropriate thing in their OWN frame space. Was this a purposefully destructive act or a huge ‘ooops’?

*Sigh* – either way the consequences are the same. ALL WORK IS LOST. I can well imagine the uproar I’m going to face when I see this class next. I’m already working on some possible solutions and some small personal development lessons around resilience and problem solving, for the class in the next couple of lessons, but the final solution will have to be added as a footnote once I’ve had an opportunity to work on this with the class together. Wish me luck….and LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKE!

I want to be angry at Prezi for (IMHO) a sucky design feature that means  a) work can’t be retrieved easily and b) the owner can’t see who has made what changes to the Prezi when working collaboratively. However, as I don’t have the design skills to create my own presentation tool as awesome as Prezi I will just have to work WITH them to help improve these issues. At the end of the day, despite using Prezi extensively myself, I still learnt the hard way that even the best web 2.0 tools aren’t perfect and even experienced operators don’t know what they don’t know until it is ‘sometimes’ too late. In the mean time, I have a class to reassure and support.