Inspired by Scott McLeod’s Leadership Day and Tweets from andyjb and stephe1234 I’d like to announce the first annual Epic Tech Fail Day!

Designed as an effort to raise awareness about the importance of being digitally resilient in the 21st Century Classroom and to help teachers new to technology understand that even digital veterans have computer meltdowns, Epic Tech Fail Day authors should write short pieces about the struggles that they’ve had in their work with technology…and then share lessons learned from their disasters. 

Here’s a sample I wrote this morning.

Submission Details:

1. In your post, include a description of your digital disaster, the reasons your failure occurred, the lessons you learned, and—if appropriate—links to tools that others can use to avoid your disaster.
2. Get your contributions posted online before August 12th.
3. After posting your contribution, fill out this form so that I can find you easily.
4. If you’re Twittering, use #epictechfail as your hashtag so we can find your posts there, too.
5. Once all entries have been collected, I’ll link to the submissions here the Radical.
6. The five best submissions will win a free copy of my newest book, Teaching the iGeneration.

Topics You Might Write About:

Maybe you had a great video-based activity that went horribly wrong because all of the video cameras in your school decided to die at the same time—or a lesson built around digital photographs captured on cameras without USB cords!

Maybe you’ve fought the Flip Camera Codex battle—something that teachers in PC schools have grumbled about more than once in the past few years.  Maybe your class wiki project fell apart in a sea of vandalism from students who weren’t quite ready to take digital projects seriously. 

Maybe you’ve:

• Had the Internet go down more times than you can count when working with kids in the computer lab.
• Found it impossible to even sign up for computer time in your school!
• Stumbled across great sites, developed terrific lessons using new tools, and had all your work go to waste because of “the firewall.”
• Discovered at the last minute that the computers in your school weren’t compatible with the external tools that you were counting on your kids actually using.

If so, consider writing for Epic Tech Fail Day!  Making your struggles transparent will help others to understand that digital efforts aren’t easy—but that glitches aren’t failures in the eyes of a determined teacher.