Was the lesson a failure?

I went into teaching my SPIN today with an idea of getting the student to modify a text document to make it an HTML document. To build on the development of the tags introduced last week and build up some new ones.
Normally this is a 50 minute lesson that took us 90 minutes.

The lesson started by everyone trying to get the files onto their computer. As it is not a school network I can't just put them in the shared network drive and have everyone access them. Google Drive is good, but for some of what I am doing it has its limitations. I must find out if students use google drive sync? That could be a solution.

I started off with the basics of an HTML page, the head, and developing code futher on using the whiteboard. The television is used by the other teacher using the same learning common. getting files onto their devices is quite a challenge in this case.

I have, school imacs, student chromebooks, student macbooks, student windows 7 and windows 8 devices all running. Doing something within a text editor, thats ok on mac and windows. I have now figured out how to get it working on a chromebook. But what about an HTML editor. I have thought about an online one, but it is nice for students to develop on their own computer.

I digress...

The whiteboard session ran ok, up until I found walking around the class that the students did not quite understand what was happening. I needed to show them, so two students went for a TV and as soon as the students saw my screen the sudden "ohhh!" is that what it looks like happened. So I need to make sure I have a better visual than a whiteboard for the students.

I finished the lesson, students working on finishing the work and I was thinking, what a failure of a lesson it has been.

I asked the students what worked well in the lesson, comments about, being able to see what was happening on the screen, getting introduced to new tags, being able to view their page and make changes.

What didn't work? The whiteboard, that was a given. There was no comment about their own technology or the issues that that they faced getting the files,  The comment that they talked about and surprised me, was they commented about their focus. It was about there own learning and developing understanding.