Randy Turner's Blog

Lost Angels: The Murders of Rowan Ford and Doug Ringler

Two children, two Missouri communities gripped with fear as the children vanished only to be found brutally murdered.

My new book Lost Angels: The Murders of Rowan Ford and Doug Ringler tells the stories of the murders of two children and how the people of Stella and Carthage feared the strangers who would commit such crimes, only to find out that the strangers were people who had been living among them all along.

Lost Angels, which is available on Amazon, examines both cases offering descriptions of the communities of Carthage on December 28, 1993 when Doug Ringler, 8, a third grader at Hawthorne Elementary in Carthage was reported missing and Stella on November 2, 2007, when Colleen Spears returned to her home after working the overnight shift at the Wal-Mart store in Jane to find her daughter Rowan Ford, 9, a fourth grader at Triway Elementary, had disappeared.

The book takes readers through the searches for the children, the discoveries of what happened to them, the investigations that led to the arrests of the killers and provides an examination of how the judicial system dealt with those killers.Lost Angels: The murders of Rowan Ford and Doug Ringler

Don't rely on memory when you write about yourself

One of the difficulties of writing a non-fiction book in which you are a character is the tendency to rely too much on memory.

Before I wrote the chapters in my new book, Silver Lining in a Funnel Cloud: Greed, Corruption, and the Joplin Tornado, that featured events in which I had played a part, I had to do as much research as I did on others who were featured in the book.

The memory has a tendency to play tricks. I was fortunate that an actual transcript existed of my termination hearing before the Joplin R-8 Board of Education, which is featured in a couple of chapters, but I had no such backup for the other chapters in which I am featured.

Before I wrote about anything, I examined e-mails I had written, blog posts I had made, Facebook messages I had sent and received, and even in one instance, checkbook entries.

I had the same result I had when I did my earlier memoir Newspaper Days. When confronted with documented evidence, I realized that some of the things I thought I knew for sure had happened to me happened differently than I remembered. The memory does play tricks.

Even when going through the transcript, I discovered things I had never realized. A few months after my hearing, to combat some of the things that were being said about my case, I published the complete transcript of my hearing as an e-book titled C. J. Huff and the Assassination of a Teacher's Character and gave it away to hundreds of readers. I knew that the transcript, which covered 10 hours of testimony, would completely confirm the version of events I had told readers on the Turner Report.

The one thing I did not do before I published the transcript was to actually read it.

I did so as I researched Silver Lining in a Funnel Cloud and suddenly realized there were bits of testimony that had never settled in my memory and surprisingly, my testimony was far better than I thought it was at the time.

I had also forgotten some of the things that Superintendent C. J. Huff and his administrative team had alleged about me, things that were not even included in the charges and which they admitted they had no evidence that any of those things had ever happened.

For other instances I included in the book, including a meeting I had with former Joplin Police Chief Lane Roberts, school board candidate Jeff Koch's vigil outside the administration building as he braved frigid weather to be the first in line to file for the office the next morning, and my meeting with two Joplin High School students who were planning to find candidates to run for school board, I relied on notes I took following those occasions and on a blog post I wrote about Koch.

In several instances, my recollections of events were bolstered by audio recordings, including a meeting in which C. J. Huff talked about the proposed bond issue to build new schools to replace those destroyed in the tornado, and the four-and-a-half-minute "interrogation" of me by Joplin Schools HR Director Tina Smith before I was escorted out of the building by a police officer.

In some instances, I also talked to other people who were involved in the same events to see if they remembered the same things I did.

So one bit of advice I can offer to anyone who plans to write about his or her own memories is not to trust those memories.

Treat your recollections as if they came from someone you had never met and verify them.

Silver Lining in a Funnel Cloud

In the months after the May 22, 2011, the city of Joplin, Missouri, earned a reputation for the admirable way in which it handled the death and destruction from the worst tornado to hit the United States in six decades.

Those who watched television or read internet or newspaper accounts in the days after the tornado became familiar with names like City Manager Mark Rohr, Mayor Mike Woolston, and School Superintendent C. J. Huff. Often they were referred to as heroes of the Joplin Tornado.

Those heroes had feet of clay, as those who read my new book, Silver Lining in a Funnel Cloud: Greed, Corruption, and the Joplin Tornado, will discover when the book is published next month.

The book begins with each of these people and what they were doing when the tornado hit and follows their activities over the next four years.

During that time, the city manager was fired, the superintendent became the object of a public movement to have him suffer the same fate, and the mayor, now serving as a city councilman, is accused of using his position and insider knowledge to benefit his business partner.

The book also follows a Texas businessman who conned Joplin leaders into thinking he would be their savior as the master developer of the tornado-stricken area and ended up taking the city for a ride.

What started with considerable hype about how Joplin had the right leaders in place at the right time has ended up as a cautionary tale of how not to rebuild a city and a school district.

The book is based on interviews, court documents, recordings, videos, and in some sections in the book, on personal knowledge, since I have played a role in a portion of the events that have taken place in the last two years.

I will reveal more information about the book during the next few weeks and I will be happy to answer any questions anyone may have about it at Goodreads' Ask the Author area.

Used book stores and the Bookmobile

From the time I was four, I was reading books. In the summer, I would show up at Gum's Store on the main street in Newtonia so I would be the first person to board the Bookmobile when it arrived.

We were given a limit of 10 books to check out for a month and I always hit that quota. It was mostly baseball biographies and fiction, though I did mix in a few mysteries.

Normally, I would take my stack of books, walk over to the store, plunk down my dime for a bottle of Doctor Pepper, then sit on the sidewalk on the west side of the building and read one of the books.

Sadly, 10 books were never enough. I usually finished them in about three days and had to wait another three and a half weeks for the Bookmobile to return.

Of course, it was easier when school was in session and I had access to the library, but school libraries were not well stocked in the '60s, and even our libraries had to rely on regular visits from the Bookmobile.

When I grew older, one of the highlights of Saturdays was going to Neosho for shopping with my mom. I was not a big shopper, but I loved the bookstore on the square. It was a wonderland of the latest issues of the Sporting News, Baseball Digest, Sport, Marvel and DC comic books, and paperbacks.

And I had a varied reading list. At school, I continued to read the sports books, but I was branching out and reading everything from Les Miserables (a wonderful book) to anything by Jane Austen, and developing a taste for books about history and politics.

As I was attending East Newton High School, my mom told me that a used book store had opened just off the Neosho square. By that time I was driving, so I began stopping at the store on a weekly basis and buying books for prices ranging from 25 cents to a dollar.

After that, Taylor's House of Books opened on the boulevard and I later added used book stores in Joplin, Pierce City, and even Brooklyn Heights to my rounds.

This week during my school's spring break, I have spent much of my time doing promotional work for my new book, Scars from the Tornado: One Year at Joplin East Middle School. I have visited various public libraries, donating copies of the book and some of my earlier books, and I have also been arranging retail outlets.

At this point, the book has no retail outlets in Neosho. The bookstore has been gone from the square for decades, and with the closing last year of Books N' Java, the city of Neosho no longer has any used book stores.

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of visiting what I believe is the only used book store in Newton County, the Read Again Book Store in Granby. Not only did I find an excellent retail outlet for Scars from the Tornado, 5:41, and Spirit of Hope, but I also reacquainted myself with an old friend, buying a paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice, as well as a history of the 1968 presidential election.

Though used bookstores have dwindled with the increased availability of books over the internet, there is still no better way to spend time than poring over both bestsellers and obsurities from the past. So I will continue to enjoy my visits to Always Buying Books and Changing Hands Book Shoppe in Joplin, the Read Again Book Store in Granby, and any other used book stores I can find.

The Bookmobile has long since vanished, a victim of progressing times. Let's make sure that book stores, whether new or used, don't meet that same fate.

Small Town News

It is hard to believe that eight years have passed since the publication of my first book, Small Town News. After a long delay, the book is now available as an e-book.

The book centers around the events that took place in Diamond, Missouri, on October 31, 2001, when the bank was robbed and my boss, Diamond School Superintendent Dr. Greg Smith, disappeared. His body was found 11 days later in a pond just outside the DIamond city limits.

The following description, which includes the evolution of my writing prior to Small Town News was published in 2005 in my blog, The Turner Report:

I wrote my first book-length manuscript (calling it a novel would be charitable, when I was 14 years old, a freshman at East Newton High School. It was 289 pages long and was titled A Song For Susan. I no longer have any copies of that work, only a cover page that somehow survived over the past 35 years. The only thing I remember about it is that it was terrible.

During my teen years, I wrote four more book-length manuscripts, none of which were memorable and had absolutely no success marketing them because they simply were not marketable. Since I was a terrible typist and did not have much patience or a good enough typewriter to work with, my friend Barbara McNeely did my typing for me, for very little pay.
Sadly, Barbara, a student at Missouri Southern State College at the time, was stabbed to death in September 1977 behind Northpark Mall after returning from an errand she ran for her employer, J. C. Penney. The man who killed her was found not guilty by reason of insanity, spent a few short years in a mental hospital and then was released into society without a word to anyone, thanks to the culpability of the Missouri State Health Department and the state attorney general at the time, Bill Webster.

Not having Barbara around took a lot of the joy out of everything for her friends for a long time, and since I have always been a person who takes an extra long time getting over anything, it was nearly a couple of years after her death before I started writing again.
The year was 1979 and by this time, I was the editor of the Lockwood Luminary-Golden City Herald and living in Lockwood. After covering night time events, I returned to the Luminary-Herald office on Main Street in Lockwood and sat in the front area, pounding out a novel, Sudden Death on an old Underwood manual typewriter. Some of the characters in Small Town Newswere originally created for Sudden Death, which revolved around the murder of a high school team's star quarterback just before the state football playoffs. I had no luck marketing it, which is probably just as well. Though it was better than A Song for Susan and the other book-length manuscripts I wrote while I was in my teens, it still lacked something. A few days after I finished writing "Sudden Death," Boone Newspapers shut down the Lockwood Luminary-Golden City Herald.

After that, it was 23 years before I started writing again. I suppose I should qualify that. I have always been writing. I estimated that during my newspaper days, I wrote more than 20,000 articles, averaging more than 1,000 a year. But even though I had left fiction behind, it was always in the back of my mind.

When Dr. Smith disappeared, I was a couple of months into my third year of teaching at Diamond Middle School. It was a discussion in one of my classes that led me to think about trying once again to write a novel. The following passage comes from a Turner Report post I wrote yesterday:

At the time, I was teaching current issues, a writing-intensive class, at Diamond Middle School. In one of my classes, we discussed the situation and I was surprised by the vehemence of the opinions students had about the behavior of the media during the whole situation. They were particularly disturbed by the way Dr. Smith's widow was treated and the scope of the questions with which she was bombarded. Almost 100 percent of the students thought the media should leave the woman alone.

The student comments got me thinking about writing the book, which is a fictionalized version of those events. The focus is on the media, as seen through the eyes of a student, a high school junior named Tiffany Everett who has a one-week internship with one of the three local television stations.

Within the 196 pages of the book, the way the media handles news in a small town is scrutinized though the actions of the high school junior, her teacher, the television reporter to whom she is assigned, and the editor of the town's newspaper.

So much has taken place since the original publication of Small Town News. I regret that I abandoned my attempts to write books for more than two decades. That will not happen again.

Small Town News

It is hard to believe that eight years have passed since the publication of my first book, Small Town News. After a long delay, the book is now available as an e-book.

The book centers around the events that took place in Diamond, Missouri, on October 31, 2001, when the bank was robbed and my boss, Diamond School Superintendent Dr. Greg Smith, disappeared. His body was found 11 days later in a pond just outside the DIamond city limits.

The following description, which includes the evolution of my writing prior to Small Town News was published in 2005 in my blog, The Turner Report:

I wrote my first book-length manuscript (calling it a novel would be charitable, when I was 14 years old, a freshman at East Newton High School. It was 289 pages long and was titled "A Song For Susan." I no longer have any copies of that work, only a cover page that somehow survived over the past 35 years. The only thing I remember about it is that it was terrible.

During my teen years, I wrote four more book-length manuscripts, none of which were memorable and had absolutely no success marketing them because they simply were not marketable. Since I was a terrible typist and did not have much patience or a good enough typewriter to work with, my friend Barbara McNeely did my typing for me, for very little pay.
Sadly, Barbara, a student at Missouri Southern State College at the time, was stabbed to death in September 1977 behind Northpark Mall after returning from an errand she ran for her employer, J. C. Penney. The man who killed her was found not guilty by reason of insanity, spent a few short years in a mental hospital and then was released into society without a word to anyone, thanks to the culpability of the Missouri State Health Department and the state attorney general at the time, Bill Webster.

Not having Barbara around took a lot of the joy out of everything for her friends for a long time, and since I have always been a person who takes an extra long time getting over anything, it was nearly a couple of years after her death before I started writing again.
The year was 1979 and by this time, I was the editor of the Lockwood Luminary-Golden City Herald and living in Lockwood. After covering night time events, I returned to the Luminary-Herald office on Main Street in Lockwood and sat in the front area, pounding out a novel, "Sudden Death" on an old Underwood manual typewriter. Some of the characters in "Small Town News" were originally created for "Sudden Death," which revolved around the murder of a high school team's star quarterback just before the state football playoffs. I had no luck marketing it, which is probably just as well. Though it was better than "A Song for Susan" and the other book-length manuscripts I wrote while I was in my teens, it still lacked something. A few days after I finished writing "Sudden Death," Boone Newspapers shut down the Lockwood Luminary-Golden City Herald.

After that, it was 23 years before I started writing again. I suppose I should qualify that. I have always been writing. I estimated that during my newspaper days, I wrote more than 20,000 articles, averaging more than 1,000 a year. But even though I had left fiction behind, it was always in the back of my mind.

When Dr. Smith disappeared, I was a couple of months into my third year of teaching at Diamond Middle School. It was a discussion in one of my classes that led me to think about trying once again to write a novel. The following passage comes from a Turner Report post I wrote yesterday:

At the time, I was teaching current issues, a writing-intensive class, at Diamond Middle School. In one of my classes, we discussed the situation and I was surprised by the vehemence of the opinions students had about the behavior of the media during the whole situation. They were particularly disturbed by the way Dr. Smith's widow was treated and the scope of the questions with which she was bombarded. Almost 100 percent of the students thought the media should leave the woman alone.

The student comments got me thinking about writing the book, which is a fictionalized version of those events. The focus is on the media, as seen through the eyes of a student, a high school junior named Tiffany Everett who has a one-week internship with one of the three local television stations.

Within the 196 pages of the book, the way the media handles news in a small town is scrutinized though the actions of the high school junior, her teacher, the television reporter to whom she is assigned, and the editor of the town's newspaper.

So much has taken place since the original publication of Small Town News. I regret that I abandoned my attempts to write books for more than two decades. That will not happen again.

Violence, statistics, and American education

No phrase irritates me as much as "data-driven education."

As someone who has dealt with educational data for the past 35 years, first as a reporter and now as a classroom teacher, I have learned that statistics should never be taken at face value.

From my discussions with teachers across the United States, I have seen many of my thoughts confirmed and many of them in a way that scares me, especially when it comes to statistics on violence in our schools.

I have heard one story after another of how school administrators, seeking to climb up the organizational ladder, report declining statistics on violent incidents and referrals, often by categorizing them differently, or by adding a separate layer of reports that are then not included in those that go to the state or federal governments.

I also hear from teachers who suffer the consequences when their building administrators, often following edicts from top administration, send those who commit classroom disruptions back into the same classrooms without any type of meaningful consequence. This has led to an increasing feeling of isolation among teachers, and in fact, has led many of them to leave for other, less stressful, better-paying jobs.

That lack of discipline has led, despite "statistics" from many school districts showing that the number of such "incidents" is on the decline, to an increased amount of bullying, which always leaves the door open to the sort of violent incident that happened April 20, 1999, at Columbine, and has been repeated since then across the country.

Education, in a frenzy brought on, in part, by No Child Left Behind, perhaps just as much as a reaction to the so-called "reformers" who are looking for ways to profit from public education or want to destroy it so they do not have to pay taxes (since they are sending their own children to private schools, anyway), has jumped on the bandwagon of one fad after another, often with sketchy, sometimes non-existent statistical backing.

And let's face it, it is hard for school boards and administrators to make names for themselves, unless they are trying the latest "innovative" methods of teaching, even as they discard those two years later for the next round of can't miss, cutting edge, state-of-the-art advancements.

All of these factors increasingly leave classroom teachers in a struggle to separate the wheat from the chaff among these educational ideas, and being forced often to make "innovations" work even when common sense says they won't.

Teachers' struggles to cope with all of these outside forces are the focus of my novel, No Child Left Alive. I had initially planned a Christmas promotion for the e-book this weekend, but I do not intend to try to make a profit from a book with that title and with the tagline "If the shooter doesn't get them, the system will," in the wake of Friday's shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut,

At the same time, I firmly believe that the issues brought up in the book are worthy of discussion, so I am offering free downloads of No Child Left Alive today (Sunday, December 16) and tomorrow.

Buzzwords like "data-driven education" and "best practices" are often the enemy of real education and rely on statistics and personal ambition that have nothing to do with the reality our nation's teachers see in the classroom every day.

Please feel free to download the book today or tomorrow at Amazon and let's start a discussion.

Creating an effective horror story

Nothing is more enticing to a young writer than a horror story and beginning today my eighth graders will try their hands at writing one.

This is the second year for the Horror Story Contest and I look forward to seeing what creative, original ways my students come up with to express themselves.
Of course, to get to those gems, I will undoubtedly have to read several dozen derivative slasher stories, with plenty of gore and little in the way of real plot or character development.

I remember my first stab (pun intended) at writing a serial killer on the loose story. It came when I was in ninth grade and we had an assignment to write a short story. I worked night after night for a week and came up with 10 handwritten pages that were clearly a ripoff of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None.”

Apparently, my teacher knew a ripoff when she saw one and I was lucky to receive a B for that assignment. The story had nothing in the way of setting, plot, realistic characters, or imagination.

I didn’t try my hand at a true horror story until 2005 when I came up with the basic idea for Devil’s Messenger. It came to me one day as I was trying out Instant Messenger, which was popular at the time, and remembered a Lon Chaney horror movie from the early ‘60s. The movie was terrible, but its title, Devil’s Messenger, always stuck with me.

Since my students were introducing me to numerous technological marvels at that time, I came up with the simple concept- a teenage girl communicates with her murdered father through instant messenger.

Since my preferred genre for fiction has always been mystery, I wanted to combine the horror story with mystery. Who murdered Cassandra Harper’s father?
That character, even more than the manipulative deceased Richard Harper is the unknown evil lurking behind everything that occurs.

The novel centers around three women- 15-year-old Cassandra, a withdrawn blogger who develops a creepy relationship with her dead father, her 16-year-old sister Brittany, the blonde, peppy cheerleader, who is much stronger and whose character is much deeper than you would think at first glance, and their mother, Sharon, a woman whose charm and beauty led three men to fall in love with her. Two of those men are dead and she is growing closer and closer to the third one, a man we see cleaning blood stains from his car.

The novel plays on three fears that many of us have:

1. No one loves us. That fear often leads to our making unhealthy decisions.

2. Technology is taking over the world. Are we the masters of technology or is it pulling the strings on our lives?

3. The unknown. Someone is out there controlling everything that happens in our lives, manipulating us for his or her own advantage and there is nothing we can do about it.

A key to a successful horror story, whether it is on a movie screen or on the written page, is to have characters that we care about. Too many horror stories follow the same formula of putting together stereotypes and then connecting the dots.

A successful horror story, one that lingers long after the final credits are shown or after the final page is turned, is one that haunts us because we invested in the characters. If we don’t care about the people in the story and are just there for the body count, that particular horror story is going to be one that quickly fades from the memory.

Some of my favorite comments about Devil’s Messenger have come from young female readers who say they saw themselves in Cassandra or Brittany. That does not happen when characters are stereotypes, tossed into a story just to be sliced and diced at some opportune time.

So as I prepare for my second year of reading chilling horror stories from teenagers who have grown up with the genre, I anxiously await the opportunity to read the type of grim mayhem these young minds devise.

They always manage to find a way to surprise me, and as we all know, the element of surprise is the key to any successful horror story.

Big time endorsements for my book

It is never easy to record a webcam video during the time of year when anyone with a landline telephone (sorry, I am hopelessly out of touch with the modern era) receives one robocall after another.

I was almost completely finished with my video, when the phone rang loudly, trashing my efforts. I answered and it was one of those calls designed to leave messages, but only on answering machines.

After a few of the mild epithets (condemn it, being one) that I always use instead of the hard stuff, I gave the video one more shot, and thankfully, it worked out.

In the video, I receive endorsements for my new e-novel about education, No Child Left Alive, from some top names, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, entertainer (and alleged singer) Britney Spears, and horror writer Stephen King.

It remains to be seen if this big-time display of celebrity firepower sells any books, but it certainly was an adventure making the video, which can be found at http://rturner229.blogspot.com/2012/1...

The Trouble with Technology

As the school district where I teach moves rapidly toward becoming one of the most modern in the United States, I received a number of reminders yesterday of the pitfalls of relying too much on technology.

For years, I have shown my eighth graders a news clip from the year 2000 about a 13-year-old boy who challenges a 15-year-old to a fight as they are riding the school bus home. When they get off the bus, the 15-year-old hits the 13-year-old on the back of the head, causing the younger boy to fall to the ground fatally wounded.

After the 13-year-old is pulled off life support, the older boy is charged with felony murder and is tried as an adult. After he is convicted, by Georgia law he is automatically sentenced to life in prison.

The 20-minute video brings up three issues that have always sparked great discussions:

1. Should a 15-year-old stand trial as an adult and should someone that young be sentenced to life in prison?

2. Should parents be held responsible for the acts of their children? The dead boy's parents state in this video that they think the killer's parents should also be in prison.

3. What should schools do to protect children? It is revealed in the video that the killer had received 34 referrals, been suspended 11 times, and had threatened to kill one girl and burn down her home.

The Miller/Belluardo discussion is one the students have always found fascinating, but I dropped it last year because of technology. My only copy of the video was on an old fashioned videocassette.

This year, I decided to bring back the case as a good way to end the first quarter. I took my camcorder and shot the story as it was playing on my TV screen. Though that it is never pretty, it worked, so I thought I was ready for a day of stimulating discussions.

Overconfidence is never a good thing.

The next morning, I arrived at school at 6:40 a.m., knowing I only had a short time to load the video onto my school-issued laptop since we had a professional development training meeting scheduled for 7:15 a.m.

The process of loading the video into I-Movie went smoothly until the very end when a message popped onto the screen showing an error. The computer I have is one of the oldest still being used in the district and apparently, the I-Movie on it was out of date. At that point, it was almost time for the meeting.

I took my computer and camcorder with me and another teacher agreed to load the video. I also knew I had the option of getting another laptop when I returned to my classroom after the meeting.

When the meeting concluded, the video was still loading on my colleague's computer, but I decided to hedge my bet, but grabbing a second laptop from our mobile I-cart and loading it there as well.

I was in the middle of that process when the math teacher who has been using the computer cart this week, came in and asked me if I was using computer number 10. I was. "That one has been causing us problems," he said. Sure enough, moments later, the computer screwed up.

One more strike against technology.

I retrieved another laptop from the cart and began the process for the third time (four counting my colleague's efforts). As I was starting, the fire alarm sounded.

We hurried for the exits, figuring it was a drill. As it turned out, it wasn't. Some smoke had set off a faulty sensor and we had to stay outside for more than half an hour as the fire department made sure the sensor was all right and we could return to classes.

When we finally got back into the building, we immediately had to go to our commons area for an assembly featuring a motivational speaker. I stayed in my room long enough to load the video. This time, it worked.

I needed to use the camcorder to video the assembly so I took it to one of the members of the Journalism Club She had just begun shooting when the camcorder died. I had let the battery run down while downloading the video.

I hurriedly returned it to my room, plugging it in so it could recharge. After the assembly, there was not enough time left in my third hour class to show the video, so I began setting it up for fourth hour and discovered that the mirroring function of my laptop was not working which meant I could not show it on the whiteboard.

We were already into fourth hour when I sent a student to see if our tech guy was available. He came into my classroom moments later and, at first, he could not figure out what the problem was. Then he hit the "Eureka" moment, as he discovered that I had unplugged the device so I could recharge my camcorder.

With that fixed, he left, and I prepared to show the video. Only I could not see the video on my screen. I could hear it, but I couldn't see it. Unforgivably, I snapped at my students, who were acting as any students would act if their teacher was playing with technology in front of the room when it was time for class to be in session. (They will receive an apology today.)

By the time, I finally found it, I was disheartened to discover that the sound on the first part of the video was not loud enough for the students to hear it- and I still had half an hour of class and nothing left to do.

As usual, I had a fallback plan, and we had a classroom discussion based on the positive and negative things that had happened to the students during the first quarter and somehow, it turned into a great discussion.

Unable to show the video, I continued with the discussions during my final two classes. They turned into some of the best discussions we have had all year, and we have had some good ones.

Last night, I reshot the Miller/Belluardo video on my IPod and I am going to try it again. The IPod loads on my IPhoto, which has been working, but I am never going to get overconfident again.

I have a backup plan just in case.

Don't you just love technology?