Today some classrooms were without Wifi due to the winter storm that hit this region last night. Most students got to school without incident, though some roads were blocked due to downed trees and flooded creeks. Strong winds had caused some areas to lose electricity with my school evidently running on a back-up generator.

But instruction still had to go on—or at least, I told my students that we weren’t going to play games that day since we had all made it to class. No way was I going to waste 53 minutes by allowing students to use their cell phones–some got on using a hotspot–or talk to each other?

The Smartboard didn’t work in my classrooms, so I couldn’t teach a traditional lesson. Instead, I relied on EdPuzzles on amusement parks in France, including Disneyland Paris and activities posted on Google Classroom in PDFs. I also encouraged students to use the textbooks in the classroom if they couldn’t access assignments. Students who has missed the quiz earlier this week took it–and fortunately, the Google Form worked. With only a few weeks left in this marking period, I pinpointed students who hadn’t finished a project and encouraged them to get it done.

Half way through the period, students asked and answered a question about what ride they liked at amusement parks. They also listened to a description of rides and identified which illustration the sentence described. They used a picture from the textbook that I had posted on Google Classroom to guide them. They did well on it.

In a higher level French class, students started a project on camping in France. Together, we read the assignment’s requirements–they were in English–and I told them they could work with a partner. At first, they complained that it was impossible to do anything productive without the Internet. That’s when I told them about my experiences growing up without technology–and we somehow managed to learn. I should have asked them to imagine a whole day without technology. What would it be like? What would they do without their phones, computers, and TVs? Would they be able to be productive and have fun? But I wanted to give them some class time to get some work done.

Twenty minutes into the period, most had managed to get on the Internet–it was a bit slow–and before long, they were smiling about finding camping gear at French stores such as Decathlon. They wanted to know if they could spend more than the 500 Euros allotted to each of them, and if they could sleep in a cabin, not a tent. They chatted quietly amongst themselves, I provided some sentences in the future tense to get them starting to think about what they will bring on the trip, how much they will spend, and if they will get along with their traveling partners. That day in class, I felt appreciated in class as I engaged them in a lesson even without the Internet’s magic and power for part of the time.