...I've got a brand new........

No, not a pair of roller skates, but a new shiny projector for my Interactive White Board (IWB).

My projector died on Tuesday, just as I was about to show my lovely Year 10 class a dramatic scene from Apollo 13 as part of our Solar System topic. We had to decamp, throw Peter out of his lab, where he was marking books, carry the laptop down there, disconnect his lap top, connect mine and show the clip.

The techies came for a look and did the typical British work man thing, lots of shaking of the head, sharp intakes of breath and tuts before confirming the death. They brought this new gadget and ordered me a new one, so yesterday I had to use this on a trolley in front of the screen. It's amazing, the picture is about 100 times clearer than the old one, the sound is better and the projection actually fills the screen, all I needed was a new bracket.

The bracket arrived yesterday, but the techies didn't have the right socket to connect it to the ceiling, so another day with the trolley.

Today they decided I could keep this projector as the new one isn't as good and they brought the correct tools and it was installed and running before my first lesson.

The rest of the Faculty have been in and out all day casting envious glances and passing comments...."Isn't that picture clear?"...."How come you got a new projector?"........"I should have had that, my projector's older than yours!"....."That's wasted on an old guy like you".....but ......tough, mine broke , I get the new one.

The strange thing is the remote for the old one works with this one too, so instead of having to learn a new remote I just carry on as normal.


IWB, eh....when I started teaching you got ...one red pen every half term and had to return the empty one before you could have a new one, one board rubber, one box of white chalk....and if you were very good....and could prove you needed it....one box of coloured chalk.

Now I have a desk top computer in my office, a lap top, the projector, a pen for writing on the IWB, a magic tablet for remote writing on several IWB's at once, a colour laser printer and several other gadgets.

How did I ever manage to teach kids before all this came along?

Das vidanya moy padruga.