Technology in the classroom part 7

I was working with two different groups of students, and two different teachers.
Basically what happened is that the project was so fuzzy, that the students never knew what they were supposed to do.
I had envisioned them doing things like making podcasts, or videos, or choosing texts and adding hyperlinks to new vocabulary words. What they were coming up with was "listening to music and getting the words to it" or "watching movies in English". Some of the teams were more ambitious: in one group they wanted to write a tv show and act it out, another wanted to download songs, get the lyrics, write some exercises, and put it all on a cd. In short, the projects were either too easy or too difficult, and there was a lot of frustration and confusion, on the students' part, on the teachers', and on mine, too.
After a heart to heart talk with the teachers, I asked the students to concentrate on vocabulary. The change in attitude was notable: they had a sense of purpose, and that helped motivate them. In short, it wasn't a total disaster and I learned some useful things:
a) the project can't be that fuzzy; it has to be a little more definite;
b) I should limit the kinds of technology I ask the students to use.
c) the students don't think of some things as technology. For example, cell phones are useful gadgets that everyone has, but they're not technology.

And speaking of cell phones, next time I'll tell you about an interesting little experiment I carried out with these two groups. Till then...