School districts take unplanned plunge into online learning | Hacker News Reader

School districts take unplanned plunge into online learning

bostonherald.com

141 pointsfinphil122 comments

As a child, I remember watching a special on TV about how children across the globe go to school.

What struck me than (and has re-surfaced now) was when they showed how children in the remote parts of the Australian outback "attended school".

Basically, they did everything via radio. E.g. the teacher would say "Here is a problem. Bobby, what is the answer? Great! Now Mary, what is the answer to the homework problem #7 from last night?"

You can find out more details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Air

My mother went to school this way in Fiji. They'd be assigned school work (the teacher would talk to each student individually over the radio). Parents would mail in their work and the teacher would mark it and announce the results over the radio, walking each child through their mistakes. The entire country could listen in as you had your maths corrected lol.

By the time I was in primary school, there were 1hr afternoon broadcasts for our age group once a week, but it was no longer about individual learning... there were just too many kids by then. It was still great fun as everyone in our class would gather around the teachers battered old radio and listen to great stories from history, and other such things.

In my school district they still haven't figured out how to proceed. The problem is there are a lot of low income families that they know don't have internet access or a computer. They can give those kids a chromebook, but that isn't very helpful with no internet access. Legally (and morally) they can't move ahead with online school if a big chunk of the students are left out.

On the other hand, I was talking yesterday with a family member in another state where they have been doing online school almost since the first day (including PE, art, etc.!). I asked them what they are doing for students without a computer or internet access and apparently that state doesn't have the same equality laws so its basically a case of too bad, so sad for poor kids.

What I hope comes out of this is the realization that internet access is a utility on the same level as water or electricity.

In the Swedish community I live in they give all children a MacBook, and they've been doing this for many years.

Given that this is Sweden almost everyone already has internet access, and if you don't you can still go to the public library and get it (and borrow a computer if you want).

Would public libraries still be open? States are shutting down businesses every week, and SF has a "shelter in place" policy. For some students, libraries and other sources of public wifi are not available at the present moment.

We are dealing with this in south Dallas right now. Many of the kids don't have access to computers or internet at home and the libraries and other places with hotspots (coffee shops, mcdonalds, etc) that kids normally go to to for internet are all closed.

The districts are planning on giving kids Chromebooks for classes but they are also figuring out how to give them personal hotspots or enable LTE on the Chromebooks. Overall, it seems most of Juniors and Seniors that couldn't afford internet before and were close to dropping out to help pay their family's bills just got their parent's approval to start working instead of going to school.

It will be very interesting (and sad) to see how this affects graduation rates and preparedness for classes come fall.

I suspect that if we're in this boat by fall, school district dollars will be spent paying for wireless hotspots or in-home connections.

Until then, we'll see band-aids. I've seen one school district parking busses with wi-fi repeaters near apartment complexes, or near student houses.

if we are in this by fall, it will be moot because people will run out of money to pay for their internet. Not many people can stay out of work for 4+ months.

People are going to be behind rent sooner than that.

I remember buying a Chromebook back in 2014 with T-Mobile connectivity. This seems like it would be a good fit.

I don't think electricity and water are provided for free to even the lowest income families.

You guys don't have social housing? A council owned house usually has water and electricity provided for free, or very heavily subsidized.

Good point. Yes, there is government housing, where the rent and utilities are subsidized or free, based on need. I was thinking of low-income folks who live in their own homes.

We do, but generally access is scarce and so many are homeless

Where I live they can be. There is a program they can apply for to receive free or heavily subsidized utilities.

Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) is a federally recognized civil right, states and districts can't opt out of it.

Unfortunately it takes lawsuits to resolve these kinds of disparities, but there is no legal basis to proceed without making appropriate accommodations for students in low income families.

The Department of Education disagrees. Look, let's do what we can to cure disparities --- special education, access, etc, but we should still be providing services to as many kids as possible.

My kids in a private school are getting high quality services and distance education right now; we shouldn't deny it to most kids in public education because a few might be left behind.

I don't know how you understood my comment to mean that we should be withdrawing education from students who are able to access it. Remedy in these situations typically looks like making up lost educational hours and paying for internet access for students who are unable to afford it.

There are districts that are actually withdrawing education and providing only enrichment instead of distance learning because of this exact rationale. I thought your comment was in support of these actions. (Indeed, one sibling of your comment is in this position).

Let's do what we can immediately, and then try and make it as fair as we can next.

I’m going to expose my ignorance here, but in 2020, how many low-income families are there without internet?

Also, would it the solve not just be to provide loaner 4G access points to those families?

The US is one of the top per-student global spenders on K-12 education, so the money is there.

> Also, would it the solve not just be to provide loaner 4G access points to those families?

It probably would, but I don't think most school districts planned for a multi-week or multi-month pandemic. So buying access points and Chromebooks, finding all the students who need them, and distributing them, probably won't happen in the short term.

In California, at least, students are eligible for subsidized ($20/month) LTE hotspots. Apparently it is provided by Sprint as part of an agreement they made when they leased spectrum that had previously been set aside for educational use. These could and should been made free for low-income families.

https://foundationccc.org/What-We-Do/Student-Success/Califor...

I'm not from the US, but it sounds like the state could and should leverage this to the maximum.

These are likely insufficient for video-based schoolwork or materials. That would max out any quota set for these hotspots

Theres no quota on the Sprint grandfathering. Check out the Calyx institute hotspot for an example (and a cool org)

When things are cleared up with covid - just go to the library and see all the seniors who have next to nothing, then think - how many of them have a grandchild in their care?

How many do? Do we have data? And what benefits are currently available to them?

Quite a few - CA has over 1.1 million homes without internet access (this means no mobile internet as well): https://connectednation.org/blog/2019/10/09/new-u-s-census-f...

I’d be interested to see how that breaks down in terms of household sizes, location, etc. Is this a rural problem? Urban? Are those households primarily childless, or with school-aged children?

Apparently in my school district it is estimated to be between 20-35% of students.

Many people have internet, but only on phones. So you could ask them to use the phone or tether a loaned laptop, but this will raise costs and other equity issues.

I think this has likely become worse in recent history. I expect all of these households have "internet" access through a smartphone, but won't have a home connection to use with school issued chromebooks.

If you don’t have a strong need for it, paying for cellular internet for every phone plus a home connection becomes hard to justify, and the cellular ones are probably the more useful of the two, for most people.

here in china i get home internet with sim cards for the whole family and a mobile data quota thrown in for free

> On the other hand, I was talking yesterday with a family member in another state where they have been doing online school almost since the first day

It's highly likely they aren't supposed to doing that. A lot of school districts around me decided to go their own way when the state didn't give specific directions after shutting every school down, mainly really rural ones interestingly enough. They are now having to back-peddle as the state steps in and exerts their authority over the districts. Similarly, in districts that simply postponed everything indefinitely (as they were supposed to), there were a number of individual teachers who tried to immediately start doing remote instruction with their kids and were quickly reprimanded by their district as soon as they were found out.

The reason is of course education equality. The state wants to make sure that every student is accounted for first. My wife is acutely aware of it since she has a non-zero number of students that lack home internet access. Students who many people would like to disregard in favor of the vast majority who do.

I feel like both sides are valid though...you can't simply not educate 99% of students because of the problems of the other 1%, but at the same time you need to make sure that 1% is able to get access too, because every child does matter.

> there were a number of individual teachers who tried to immediately start doing remote instruction with their kids and were quickly reprimanded by their district as soon as they were found out.

That sounds very odd.

Not if you spend enough time chatting with teachers. From what I have heard, oftentimes they find themselves blocked by administrative busybodies at every turn, as a matter of course.

> From what I have heard, oftentimes they find themselves blocked by administrative busybodies at every turn, as a matter of course.

This doesn't seem to be a case of "administrative busybodies", though, there are material consequences to only educating the students with access to internet.

Under another president, we could be looking at turning internet into a public utility. Sadly, we are stuck with making do with this crisis the best we can.

Odd that they would try to skip straight to remote instruction, or odd that they would be reprimanded for it?

So the most equal solution is no school for anyone.

Of course, that likely has more impact on the kids without family support than those in families that can manage some education on their own, and actually makes inequality worse than starting with best effort and working to fill in the gaps.

Guidance from the Federal Department of Education...

>To be clear: ensuring compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), † Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (Section 504), and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act should not prevent any school from offering educational programs through distance instruction.

https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/frontpage/faq/rr/...

This concern is generally less related to disabilities and more related to poverty. The constitution requires that all students have equal access to education - Brown v. Board of Education is an important decision in this vein, for example. Moving the school district to a system which some students are not able to access due to inability to afford the means of access would almost certainly be found in violation.

Same here. The best case for community broadband I've ever heard.

The house stimulus bill has money for funding broadband for this reason (and remote work though if can't afford internet probably can't work remote...).

The Republicans are attacking it as 'Obamaphone 2.0'...

Which actually sounds like a much quicker way to get internet to more kids in cities.

We've already spent how much money failing on rural broadband - but I think the same issues with rural cell service.

“Too bad so sad for poor kids”

C’est la vie.

My kid is a kindergarten student at a very well-resourced school in Silicon Valley. Pretty immediately, they set up a virtual learning system that is used to assign tasks and for kids to share work. I appreciate that the teachers are doing what they can, but honestly for younger kids this sort of thing isn't really that helpful.

The system is far from seamless (even as someone who runs an edtech startup, I have found it very difficult to navigate). A task that takes the kid 5 mins to complete often takes at least as long to upload/process. That's not a good time ratio when you're looking to have your kid occupied so you can work/make food/etc.

Instead of using the online system, we are taking this as an opportunity to let our child explore interests and get much more personalized learning than is given at school. Khan Academy has been great for math, and the books we read at home are more advanced than the standardized assignments given online.

Doing things this way definitely takes a bit of time from our schedules, but I'm not sure it actually takes more time than if we did the online stuff. And at the end of the day, our child will have learned much more and with a more engaged attitude. Honestly, I think one of the bigger risks/downsides is that our kid will develop an arrogant attitude toward school — that it's too easy and not worth paying attention to.

This would seriously be a great opportunity to delivery a better educational experience to our first grader—except between both parents trying to remote work and two younger siblings, it’s simply not gonna happen. We just hope all this isn’t too big a setback. The schools are trying but there’s no way for it to work very well, with so little planning and no training for anything like this, and without at least one parent able to put in two or three focused hours teaching per day.

Yeah, it definitely takes some time. But we are saving a little time not having to drive our kid to and from school, and breakfast can happen as slowly or quickly (with less parental intervention) since we're not rushing off to school.

I am glad that my kids are so young going through this turmoil. I'm sure it is much more disruptive for older kids who are applying to college, and for parents who feel they have to make sure their kid doesn't fall behind. Must be very stressful and time-consuming.

I have felt the opposite. Older kids can self-direct much better than younger children, and they also understand the concept of work and are better able to entertain themselves. I think 5-7 yo are going to have the toughest time educationally during this.

In my district, it is not ideal, yet it is better than I expected.

The Junior high is sending out independent assignments where it makes sense - math, mostly, as there is existing online cirriculum with automated scoring. For English, they are reading books, then getting on a Zoom call with the whole class to discuss it. There are some ongoing Zoom calls to talk as a class. They are probably only covering half as much as they did while in the school building, but the topics they do cover are working well.

The elementary schools are varied - they are covering more topics, at a shallower level. Mostly, they are handing out online assignments and independent projects to do, and the kids are reporting back to the teachers. One of my kids' teacher is recording video each day to talk the kids through the daily plan and give them some encouragement.

Is this all perfect? No. But to go from in-classroom teaching to online with only 2 days to plan... I think they are doing fine.

Same here. I expected a chaotic uncoordinated scramble, but it turns out at least in our district, the teachers and school leadership are reasonably prepared. We got packets of assignments, hardcopies and E-mailed, and they managed to do a class-wide videoconference the first time with no visible technical screw-ups.

The biggest failure/bottleneck turns out to be my ability to make time to schedule homeschooling, due to needing to work normal office hours.

Serious question: will schools and universities reopen in the fall?

A large university with dormitories is kind of like a cruise ship on land: everyone eats, sleeps, plays and works together.

Elementary and High schools are somewhat better in that kids go their own homes at night. But they still eat, play and study together. Hallways of high schools between classes see lots of cross-campus shoulder-to-shoulder traffic as kids rush from one class to the other.

What are the odds that schools and universities open at all in August/September? Will they shutter for a full year? Will there be tuition discounts?

That depends entirely on how long it takes for the pandemic to cease. If, like some studies show, the virus gets stopped by the warmer weather, it could be in May that we return to normalcy.

> If, like some studies show, the virus gets stopped by the warmer weather

Looks at the map of infections, focusing on areas near the equator... No, I wouldn't count on it.

I guess we fucked ourselves moving to green energy. Time to turn on the coal burners and get to warming this planet up.

It’s less warmer weather than higher humidity. Not going to help most of Europe or North America and winter will come round again, likely before a vaccine or a cure. Everyone should be wearing masks to inhibit spread.

I have a feeling governments are going to relax restrictions given the enormous economic costs we're absorbing right now. It may be medically advisable to keep this up for like 18 months, but there's a cost to plunging the world into a global depression that could outweigh the cost of treating a rampant virus. At some point we're going to have to declare the curve to be sufficiently flattened and ride it out until a vaccine can be deployed.

The cost to plunging the world into a global depression is far worse than this virus will ever be.

conclusory statement.

You got to ask, are our homes burning, our factories being bombed. Our skilled workers going to die?

Answer is no.

Only danger we face if we bring the hammer down and squash this is it'll upset the delicacy balanced system extracting passive rents from working class people.

Could you share the analysis that led you to this conclusion?

Worse than killing millions? What's the economic impact of that?

And then we'll have to learn to live with the knowledge that our "strong" economy can't handle a pandemic with a 1% death rate, and that we were incapable of handling it as well as other countries like South Korea.

> Elementary and High schools are somewhat better in that kids go their own homes at night.

Isn't it the other way round? For containing the spread of the virus, it's better to have the students mixing the same closed group 24 hours a day, than to spend 12 hours back with their families or other communities.

In the Uk I expect they will shut down hard, then after the NHS recovers a little we'll get a little holiday from the shut down to spread the infection a little.

I guess they will do this in phases (e.g. some shops will be opened for a weekend) over the spring/summer and then we'll all go back to school next academic year.

I obtained an online CS degree fifteen years ago; my kids are doing middle and high school online for the first time last week. Most of my online classes were before my teens were born.

Similar: Its fifteen years later, I'm not exactly the first person to get an online degree, but we still have to pretend all this stuff was invented last week.

Different: Fifteen years ago we pretended we could "Work any time we want" although to obtain online discussion points with minimal effort we felt we had to log in at 9am when new discussion topics were posted. Today they don't even pretend you can work when you want and the kids need to be butts in seats logged in, working or not working, for fixed hours, kinda like hourly workers. On the other hand the concept of "write your essay at home in the evening" is gone, kids stop at the end of the online school day.

Different: Fifteen years ago we pretended online productivity tools did not exist so the tool experience was shared and there was exactly one vertically integrated system for assignments and discussion. Some schools even tried to roll email into their vertical lockin silo. Today there are official supported tools like google docs/drive and notability and similar, but kids pretty much can use what works for them. Lots of complaining about how its unequal that some kids use the grammar / spelling checker in MS Word and other kids are stuck with google docs spelling checker and plenty of mythology over which is "better" at getting higher grades.

Different: Fifteen years ago the only non-vertical silo tools used was MS Office, which made life hard on anyone not on windows with office. MS Doc files and Excel files and Visio and so forth. Now a days its a FOSS and SAS world, I don't think my kids have ever officially used MS Office, LOL. Its all about that free google docs account.

Similar: Online discussion is still lame. In person teachers get used to asking the class questions where there's only something useful for maybe the first three kids to comment, for time limit reasons. "Because its easy to track" online class means you get the same dumb questions with three answers, although the entire 20 person class is graded on participating in discussion, so discussions become about 17/20-ths worthless. The first couple kids to participate in online discussion who use up the good topics get some social pressure to shut up next week.

My wife is a 3rd grade teacher in the Bay Area and to hear stories from the other side of the online classroom. She's perfectly internet savvy and there are a lot of online parent/teacher communication platforms that she uses. Normally, being a teacher is pretty damn stressful and the hours are looong. But this has taken a step into a new direction of anxiety and stress.

Adding to the list of things that a teacher already is responsible with doing is Tech Support. Because now parents are emailing her stupid questions that are easily google-able about Google Classroom.

* "How do I upload a picture?"

* "Can you email me the google classroom link again?"

* "What's the login for my kid? (omg this question)"

* "Where's the thing to click on? (fuuuuuuu.....)"

The district is now starting to have a minimum of 8 mandatory teaching sessions to parents on how these things work. EIGHT.

We cannot translate online classrooms 1:1 with the real thing. I wish the district would take a breath and approach this with a little bit more understanding that this is a whole new ballgame. I know parents need their kids to be somewhat occupied during the day (I have 2 kids under 4 so I get it), but overall it's not very pleasant for teachers.

Mark Rober (the Glitter bomb package theft guy) started a Physics class today on Youtube. According to Youtube numbers, 70K people were watching it at the beginning and 377K had watched it when it was over.

I watched it with my daughter and it was review for both of us, but it also was very, very good.

https://youtu.be/pPn-Bay_ANU

Oh now that's delightful. It's very 2012 youtube again, raw and hokey! I love it.

That was really good (tnx!)... until the Q&A. Oh well - maybe he could demonstrate the concept of an errata follow-up in a next video.

FWIW, here are my favorite heavy gas videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckaJs_u2U_A , https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=30&v=drBjDy96iNI , and an image to help with "but how can things float on something you can't see" https://www.flickr.com/photos/10192726@N00/1367178603 . One can also play with layered drinks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVsMmCb3Cdw . Self-layering latte is nifty, but harder to explain and make: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/science/lattes-layers-cof... , https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01852-2 FWIW.

My 9th-grade daughter so far prefers this remote learning, as it makes efficient use of her time, and so gives her a lot more free time. At school, lots of kids don't want to focus (this is in the middle of Silicon Valley and helicopter parents), and slow down the class. Now she is away from that stress, and is a lot happier, despite her being an extrovert.

My daughter (also grade 9) has been doing online distance learning since grade 5. She often expresses how much she enjoys not having to deal with all the time wasted on discipline issues.

A lot of schools are leaving parents almost entirely (or entirely) on their own.

I run an edtech company, and we started offering free access to our reading software soon after shutdowns started two weeks ago. We have heard from a lot of teachers and administrators, but we've also heard from many parents who are trying to educate their kids with little to no support.

Although it is more efficient for us to create accounts for teachers (and cover 30 students simultaneously), we heard from so many parents who can't get ahold of their kids' teachers that we started making temporary accounts for parents also. It has been shocking to hear how many parents are unable to even contact their kids' teachers — I have a small child who is home from school, and if the teacher were MIA I would be surprised and not thrilled (though in these unprecedented times, kindness and flexibility are important to keep in mind!).

Are you guys hiring? My wife is looking for work. (masters in ed psych with a lot of experience designing lms and facilitating training)

We could, if the right candidate came along. We are actually just about to announce that our tech has been adopted by a major LMS, so the timing could be interesting. user name at gee mail for more info!

victor.r.rogers at gee mail

Thanks

This is a district level (or perhaps state level) decision. I live in San Jose and have two elementary age kids in the public school system. Like the top commenter noted, this district is hugely variable in terms of socio-economic demographics, and the district policy prevents them from starting any online system that doesn't work for all students. Being a fairly poor district, not all kids have computers at home, and the schools mostly don't issue devices, either. As a result, teachers who are trying to provide any sort of continuity are entirely on their own, and in violation of policy.

We've been seeing a lot of Zoom + Classdojo + Google Classroom ... and for the younger kids, things like Achieve 3000, multiplication.com, etc., that they were already using in school.

A few months before COVID-19 broke out, I started working with the founder of a platform called eTAP, which the founder first build about 20 years ago. We haven't begun the platform redesign yet, but it is fairly thorough platform for K-12 students who can benefit from an online supplement for math, science, language arts, and social studies. Parents can monitor progress, but don't need to be involved in lesson plans etc. as it's essentially ready to go.

https://www.eHomeschool.org

The free trial can be extended as long as necessary. Just message us.

When I was in high school (mid-90s in a rural area), we had teachers via live satellite (the TI-IN network out of San Antonio) for those subjects with few interested students or no qualified staff resources.

https://books.google.com/books?id=HGVQDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT234&ots...

We would connect via phone and participate in classroom activities with the teacher and other students on a rotating schedule. It was all lecture and interactive learning for the duration of the daily broadcast. The teachers were good. The production was high quality (for the time). And I can only imagine they did it on a shoestring budget.

This video is a perfect example of both the production quality and is filled with examples of the type of rural districts it served: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx0L5_wu9J8

That said, my experience was that it simply couldn't match the value of being in a classroom with a demanding teacher. The social expectation provided by an engaged teacher and the ability to directly measure my performance against my peers was critical. And that experience has made me generally skeptical of those who present distance learning as some sort of educational panacea.

Schools have long noted that parental involvement is the biggest indicator of which students will struggle and which students will succeed. Given the current circumstance where parents are expected to shoulder a larger burden in making sure kids are engaged and learning, the gap between successful students and unsuccessful students will likely increase.

I live in South Carolina, and have one child in elementary school, and another in middle school. I've been surprised by how quickly the teachers and schools have moved the entire curriculum online. The middle school kids all already had iPads to take home, and their teachers were already doing a lot on Google Classroom. So for them, it was an incremental change, not a night and day difference.

The elementary school had all the teachers put together three weeks worth of take home work, which parents had to come pick up from the school. So the actual work is on paper. Feedback is done through ClassDojo, where the teachers also post videos and share work from the children.

Altogether, they've done an impressive job in our district, all things considered.

The hardest part is getting the kids to wrap their heads around the idea that these are school days, not holidays. I don't think there's an app for that yet.

Will this help us to see the massive expenditures we make to move people to a classroom when they could easily see it via computer screen? Especially if we then ask students to just look at the chromebooks they are given by the school, seems wildly inefficient to continue the butt in seat model, especially with older students.

I think this will confirm the exact opposite.

How do the kids learn to socialize? Facebook or Facetime only? Don't say the parents have to organize this (see below for my current experience).

And for those of us with really young kids, this work from home may be great an all, but its really hard to work and tend to a very young one's education/attention.

Public schools are generally pretty terrible at socialization. The students interact mostly only with kids of their same exact age. Bullying and violence are ubiquitous. Sure, you learn how to conduct yourself in that particular environment, but it's unlike any other environment you'll see in your adult life outside of a prison.

If a third grader hangs around third graders all day in school then I would expect those would be his friends. Until he starts participating in activities where kids participate in where the grades get mixed (ie. school basketball team). This seems entirely appropriate to me.

And you're comparing public schools to prison? Remote learning for all of them would fix this?

The point is that of all of the places where a kid could be socialized the public schools are at best sub-par and at worst counterproductive. It seems appropriate to you likely because it's a societal norm and it's what you've experienced, but it's not the best environment that you can give your child.

And I don't know why you're clutching your pearls about the prison comparison. It's a common topic of discussion, how the public schools are similar to prisons, employ similar methodologies, how the stakeholders have similar motivations, and even how the two systems are symbiotic with one another.

I'm not saying remote work will necessarily solve everyone's problems, but that if you're concerned about your child's socialization you should be concerned about what's happening to him in the public schools.

The social environment of any school, public or private, is a function of the prevailing norms and behaviors of the community it serves. Bullying and violence are nothing specific to public schools. Many private schools have similar issues, and many public schools have few of those issues. It isn't as simple as you would like to portray it.

> How do the kids learn to socialize? Facebook or Facetime only?

A combination of online activities and irl could work.

Or, conversely, we may observe the same problem that MOOCs have — it’s _very_ hard to motivate the average person to sit at a computer and learn some topic which is boring to them. Engagement is low.

Computers are great for reinforcing the rote part of learning. They are currently terrible for getting students motivated or over mental blocks. Those issues can be addressed by well designed programs, but US teachers were largely unprepared for this abrupt change in format.

Not sure it's fair to compare compulsory (or even well-motviated) education with most MOOCs.

I have a PhD and a research job, so I think it's fair to say that I can learn independently and like doing so. And yet, my Coursera account is full of half-completed classes that weren't quite what I wanted: too easy, too hard, topic isn't what I wanted, presentation isn't my style, etc.

It looks, in short, just like my Netflix queue and that isn't surprising because they're both things I do in my pajamas. The situation would be very different if there were actual consequences for finishing these MOOCs (or Lost).

My mother is a first grade teacher. While many things like math, reading, spelling, etc. can be delivered remotely (and I've been really impressed at the speed at which she has digitized it all) there is a lot of crucial tactile and social learning that occurs at that age that we have no real substitute for yet.

I teach the classical guitar, in small groups of up to four students. I have them send me recordings, and I ask them for permission to share with the other students in their group. In that way, they're playing not only for themselves, but for the others they know. Keeps at least a little bit of the social motivation intact..

Do we really need to isolate society even further?

We won't know until we see standardized testing for this cohort. Which won't be until next year.

I suspect kids of wealthy, educated parents will actually excel. Those parents will learn that they could can actually do better than schools on the pure academics.

Unfortunately, I suspect kids of poorer parents will really slow down.

But, yes, I think we're about to unbundle a lot of education.

I don't know about unbundling. But it wouldn't be a surprise if at least relatively motivated students being individually homeschooled for a while--even given remote work challenges--by wealthy, educated parents did pretty well. (Whether or not on standardized tests is perhaps less certain.) Whereas kids in less good home environments aren't likely to.

Schools are providing bundles of tools: computers, textbooks, teaching, videos, testing, classrooms, group work, childcare, 'nutrition services,' libraries, etc.

The crisis takes away the classrooms and exposes the tools to parents. And for some people the classroom made little difference, or held them back.

By fall, I think you'll have people asking whether school boards shouldn't just offer the tools. Let people pick and choose their own arrangement of teaching, video, testing and groupwork. (This would let wealthier parents recover some of the amount spent on unproductive childcare, and put it into learning and socialization.)

They’re canceling standardized testing here. There’s not much point if you know it’s gonna be bad compared to other years, and there’s little you can learn from the details of the failure to apply to the next years. They already know “have a better quarantine plan” is he answer for this time (though arguably uncommon enough that the right amount of time and money to spend fixing it is zero). No need to test, and anyway they may not be back in classrooms to do it.

[edit] though yeah, future years’ testing may tell us something. However, since it’s happening to all grades, and given how often other factors change that make results incommensurate, it’ll be tough to pull anything useful out of the numbers.

Well for kids under 12 or so, we move them to a classroom in part because it offers babysitting. It also works better. My almost 4 year old isn't learning much with remote learning and it's also just taking out parent productivity.

Additionally, I still don't see VC offering the same level of social interaction and ideas transfer that in person does - one big gap I've seen is the difficulty "forking" larger conversations into smaller ones (it just doesn't come naturally like it does in person). I would not have wanted my education to be remote for that very reason.

My school district sent out an email basically saying they won't educate us on anything new for the unforeseeable future. They're not going to give any graded assignments or really collect any work from us. Essentially, it's just us reviewing things for the next month or so.

On a side note, College Board plans to make students take AP tests from home (presumably they have a plan to stop cheating): https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/about-ap/news-changes/cor...

Some school districts have chosen this path (focusing on enrichment or review) because they're concerned about legal compliance, given that they are no longer able to provide all federally mandated special education programs.

I was director of community life for The TAG Project at one time. This grew out of me being a homeschooling parent.

My first website grew out of online interest in what I did to educate my kids. I'm on parenting website number three or four. It's called Raising Future Adults.

Without an audience and engagement, I'm at a loss as to how to develop it. If anyone wants to shoot me an email to pick my brains, maybe that will help jumpstart that project so people have one more resource from someone who has lived more or less under some degree of quarantine for decades and homeschooled, done remote work, etc.

Disasters are also opportunities. Inventing and re-inventing, in a hurry, can force us to put in 'good enough' solutions, which end up iterating into true innovation and paradigm changes.

This is not a "schools are broken" rant. There are schools, staff and teachers which do tremendous, underappreciated work. With 4 kids between the ages of 9 and 19, I have seen it first-hand.

There is always room for improvement and improving remote education would make learning opportunities available to many more people, and be a great experience for many.

The 'conversation' theme in this post for example: https://seths.blog/2020/03/the-conversation/

And the 'collaboration' theme in this post: https://avc.com/2020/03/teaching-online/

I have two kids in elementary school. Our school district issues Chromebooks for all students in the district and have been doing this for several years. We are fortunate to have Google Fiber in the city and have a fairly high percentage of households with broadband. I believe the district already worked with families prior to the outbreak to provide hotspots.

The students will resume class on Tuesday, but they did a quick systems check today and it went a lot better than I would have expected. The teachers and school district have worked very hard to pull this off quickly.

For students that receive free and reduced food, the district has set up delivery locations at various spots in the city so kids will still have access while the physical schools are closed.

I don't know how they will handle some of the special classes like physical education or music yet, that will be interesting to see.

My kids district is doing well all things considering. I look forward to things settling in and becoming more consistent. For the most part it is google classroom assignments. No lessons or zoom sessions. No one on ones with teachers to connect with each kid to check in. Several emails a day from various teachers with directions that sometimes are for me, sometimes for my kid and sometimes for both. It’s a lot to process, especially working full time with more than one kid. We’re getting by though and overall it’s pretty amazing how technology is pretty miraculous in giving us all opportunities from home. Hopefully some of the tricks the teachers and schools learn during this time will yield creative New teaching practices.

Our son went from boatschooling to regular school so is pretty well versed in remote and online learning. Part of the problem is he enjoys the social interaction that he could only get from meeting other kids (majority of cruisers are much older and retired). He's a lot more nimble about remote learning than I give him credit for.

He's taking it pretty well has a lot of experience in offline and online remote learning. He's a teenager now and I'm watching eat everything in the fridge. When my mom used to joke about needing to put a lock on the refrigerator, now I get it!

My district had already given all high school students Chromebooks; when they announced the closures they provided all students (K-12) with the same. For families without internet access, hotspots were acquired and distributed. It was great! Having done all this, though, they forbade the instruction of any new content and closed the grading system.

Teachers still do videoconferences via Google Meet and/or Zoom, but it's mostly for social interaction rather than teaching.

fwiw, our experience has been lackluster and frustrating. My child is in public elementary school, in the inclusive class (special ed and non special ed in same class). So there are 2 teachers and they split the subjects Language arts/Social studies, Math/Science, and then he has a few specials like STEM, Technology, Music once a week that each have a different teacher.

The biggest problem that we had last week was that each teacher, and sometime each subject had a different system to log into. It made getting everything setup a bit of a challenge and there was always confusion about where to go next when we transitioned to a new subject. My spouse has a degree in education, and I make my living heading up product and technology team and we found it challenging. I imagine that folks without those backgrounds are really struggling.

This week seems to have gotten better, and all the love in the world to the teachers who had their plans upended by this, but I am frustrated with the school/county administration for not having this more nailed down and standardized for kids who were out sick and having to use the systems outside of this quarantine.

In the UK we are just starting our first week of national school shutdown, and the transition is very abrupt and many schools poorly prepared. I have children in primary (U.S. grade K-5) and secondary (U.S. grade 6-10) and primary is barely functional. They have some basic content on their website but no equipment and no interaction between school and students so far. But secondary is far better - all students have iPads and online classrooms, curriculum based work set every day, teachers interacting regularly with students, study groups for the students, even time-based tests. Hopefully the primary schools can trim things around, since the schools seem unlikely to restart until after the summer break - 5 more months

In my home state of Michigan, online learning doesn't count toward teacher curriculum or retirement. The reasoning is that not all students can get access to online learning.

It effectively makes it so there is really no point in providing online learning resources/lessons, because it will all need to be repeated/made up when the students get back.

Later part is similar here in PA. They're given random work (it's up to the teacher what it is). But none of it counts/can be graded.

Won't work with elementary school kids (son in first grade), I'll have to sit with him on his zoom sessions to keep the peace, and it's not pleasant when you have 24 kids + parents simultaneously on a session. I rather have him do Khan, SD Math and Reading eggs on his own time.

Yep we just got started for my kindergartner and it's a disaster so far. It takes constant supervision to get him to do any work. My mother reminded me that I was in half day school through second grade (830-12, including lunch) and she says she made no special effort to enhance my academics after school. This did not stop me from taking all the moderately advanced math I could get my hands on later in school, at least through the end of high school. I also fates decently in writing and reading throughout.

So I am taking a low pressure approach, mostly focused on writing (reading and math are things the child will do without supervision if they come in the form of screen time). I still feel he is severely missing out because K is mostly about socializing, but at least he won't be behind anyone else his age on this front.

There are going to be all kinds of interesting sociology studies on the kids who went through school this year.

Seattle punted for equity -- (following state level recommendations).

“OSPI does not recommend an online distance learning model unless a district can ensure that all students will have equal access to learning,” the district’s COVID-19 update page says. “Seattle Public Schools is the largest district in our state with a diverse student population and many of our students do not have regular access to technology or the internet.”

https://www.geekwire.com/2020/seattle-public-schools-closing...

Private schools are able to make different assumptions about their students and have almost all gone to online learning during the pandemic. This, along with an uptake in technology, is creating a clear win for private education if you can afford it for your kids, further draining public systems of their more well to do students.

All the wealthy / educated / WFH parents are still going to homeschool or set up alternative remote education options for their children instead of letting them go six months without education. It's not like Amazon employees are gonna say "oh wow, I guess school is out for equity reasons, better let my kid play video games instead of learning."

So all this will accomplish is ensuring that only the wealthiest 30% of students get educated, instead of the 90+% with internet access.

Quote: "“They were engaged. They were happy to see each other,” she said, and some students expressed a feeling they never thought they’d have: “They miss being in school.”"

Well, my kids are on the opposite spectrum of this feeling. For them, going to school is a drag. Perhaps I made too good of an environment at home, maybe I should be more drastic, maybe.....nah, just kidding, I love giving them a real home, not just a roof against rain.

I can't wait until the kids all realize why the adults prefer to WFH. When this is all over they're going wonder why they have to go back to getting up early to catch the bus to spend all day sitting in uncomfortable plastic chairs and being told to be quiet and stay off their phone.

My oldest daughter just graduated from an online high school. We get it. Now the rest of the country is going to get it.

Do you have recommended resources or advice with the online high school?

For some of us in states that cannot legally move forward with instruction, it might be an option to apply for an online high school.

We went with Northstar Academy: https://www.northstar-academy.org/

Do most adults prefer WFH? I mean sure, I prefer WFH if I have a 2 hour round trip commute, but on a 30 minute or less? The office interactions are worth it.

This would be an interesting time if a company developed a very affordable VR headset and software to let teachers give virtual classes in 3D. Maybe even have a free-roam time for students to interact with each other. Bell rings, and they get a portal back to their desk.

Maybe something like Google Cardboard

So how do we know what Google Classroom does with all the personal data they collect on children?

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