My first session or When I clashed with technology!

This Tuesday I’ve started implementing my Curricular Unit and I made my debut facing up to a technical hitch! I was a bit nervous because it was going to be my first experience leading a classroom. On Tuesday they have class in the “Aula d’Idiomes” which has a projector, Internet connection, loudspeakers, etc., so I had prepared two PowerPoint presentations. The first one was an introduction of my Unit in which I explained what we were going to do, which were my objectives, how I was going to assess them and so on.

I started with this PowerPoint, and the first strange thing occurred! I'd created some animations to catch their attention, like little cars moving through the US map, and I'd configured transitions effects in paragraphs and through the slides according to the speech I had planned, but most of these effects didn’t work!! I didn’t expect that, so I had to adapt my speech to the presentation.
Then I had prepared another PowerPoint file to start talking about US cities. It was a presentation with the cities that we are going to work with located in the map and full of photographs of their landmarks and characteristics points, so that they could be able to identify them.

– So, let’s start talking about US cities.... mmmm.... nope! Wait a moment.... the PowerPoint doesn’t seem to work... lets try it again... (1 minute.... 2 minutes...)
– Do you want me to ask the computer specialist that is right there? -Mercè asked me.
– Ok! (At that point I don’t know if I was nervous or furious with technology)
– Which version of PowerPoint have you used? -the computer specialist asked me.
– 2003.
– Ok, that’s the problem, many 2003 effects don’t work on PowerPoint 2000, which is the version that we’ve installed here! I’m sorry, but you must try to convert your files to PowerPoint 2000....

This is more or less a summary of what happened. So, what did I do for the remaining 25 minutes? Fortunately I had brought the activities that I had prepared for the next session about Chicago, so we started with an introductory listening about this city.
At the end it was all right, but I must admit that on Tuesday I clashed with technology!!
I felt a bit sad and annoyed because it was my first session and I had prepared and worked a lot with these two PowerPoints, but instead, the session was splitted and obviously, the next session about Chicago was also splitted.

But well, we must be flexible, isn’t it?