Probably my most memorable time having a technology fail during class was using someone else’s lesson plan without a trial run beforehand. There was an amazing documentary series from PBS that had a teaching resources website full of class activities. One activity was designed to get students to understand more about global health challenges related to malnutrition. The activity described four diets that provided individuals with enough calories but were seriously deficient in a key macro or micro nutrient that would provoke a disease like scurvy or kwashiorkor. Students had to input the food items and serving size into a website to find out how many of key nutrients each item would provide, and then total this for all the foods eaten in a day to find out what that nutritional deficiency that person’s diet would put them at risk for. We watched the documentary segment, then got to work on the activity. First issue: the website recommended by the activity was no longer active. Quick frantic search on my part found some alternative websites the students could use. But then, students ran into difficulty translating the serving sizes from the activity into metric measurements. Quick demo to show how the google search bar can sometimes translate between measurements. In the end, the alternative websites calculated things differently and the diets were not clearly linked to specific nutrient deficiencies after all that work on the part of the students. In the moment I mostly felt the stress of finding workarounds, but later I felt embarrassment that my cool activity ended up being a bust. My take-away was realizing the importance of verifying weblinks and trying something out ahead of time. Not only did the tech fail me, but the activity ended up being a lot of busy work (calculating and noting down how many micrograms of calcium and several other key nutrients for 20 food items!) for not much educational payout. I will admit that my last-minute class planning sometimes has me scrambling for activities even after that bad experience, but now I am a little more wary of activities with lots of moving parts and unfamiliar technology.