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Necessity is the mother of invention. I’m used to students giving me all kinds of excuses for why they can’t submit their assignments on time. Recently, I’ve heard

• my printer isn’t working
• my computer crashed
• my printer’s out of ink
• my cat peed on it
• my dog chewed it up
• my baby brother flushed it down the toilet

Well,  maybe not “my baby brother flushed it down the toilet”, but one student, Lydia,  did tell me that the sink in her kitchen  got plugged up,  overflowed and  ruined her project.   Apparently, Lydia  just loved doing her homework lying on the kitchen floor in front of the sink. She was doing her work there and got up to get  something from  another room and that’s when it happened.  The sink over flowed soaking her assignment with dirty water ruining it.   Go figure!

This year,  I’ve been getting some new excuses all to do with USB drives.   I can’t hand in my work because

• I lost my USB drive.
• I forgot my USB drive at home.
• My brother has my USB drive, and I can’t find him.
• I can’t find my project on my USB drive.

I advise my students to send me their work via email as a back-up in case something happens to their USB drive. No one has come up with excuses involving email, yet.   Maybe they don’t know about Corrupted-Files.  For a small fee,  students can download a corrupted file and then email the corrupted file to their teachers.

This download includes a 2, 5, 10, 20, 30 and 40 page corrupted Word file. Use the appropriate file size to match each assignment. Who’s to say your 10 page paper didn’t get corrupted? Exactly! No one can! It’s the perfect excuse to buy yourself extra time and not hand in a garbage paper.

I guess it’s just a matter of time.

photo by rberteig

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Comments

2 Responses to “New technology equals new excuses for why students can’t submit work on time”

1. Eric on August 10th, 2009 3:16 pm

   I’ve quite using a USB drive for the most part. There are too many online storage websites that can be used, including the following:

   Drop.io
   Evernote
   Dropbox
   Google Documents (of course)
   Microsoft Live

   I’m sure there are others as well.

2. Elona Hartjes on August 11th, 2009 9:57 am

   Eric,
   Great idea. I’m going to look into this with my classes. Thanks.

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  These are my personal views and not those of my employer.