Our school district's entire eLearning plan relies on Zoom for full day live streaming. Basically every teacher of every class live streaming all day. Not sure how many other districts and colleges had similar plans.
My district started with Zoom in the spring, then switched to Meet when the Zoom security issues got hot, and ultimately settled on Webex for the fall because it was the most like Zoom, carried enterprise support, and because Meet is still missing far too many necessary features for teachers (breakout rooms, raise hand, etc).
This showed “coming in fall”: https://educationblog.microsoft.com/en-us/2020/06/20-updates...
Are they expecting students to “sit in class” by watching a live zoom lecture?
Too many schools are taking the approach that our learning wasn't structured enough in the spring, so we are going to the opposite extreme.
It's going to have a negative effect on the children and caregivers.
We have non-technical people on tight deadlines trying to reproduce brick and mortar on a computer screen. It's not going to end well. I feel for them, they are trying their best.
Not that professionals necessarily have the greatest attention spans; I've only somewhat joked that I couldn't deal with all-day high school classes today even in-person. But all-day Zoom seems totally undoable for kids.
The issue though comes down to each school is mandated to have so many school days and hours of instruction for the year. You can't just have a school year of 1 hour days and call it a year.
If they don't actively teach the students for 900+ hours for the school year, they are in violation of the state mandate. Does giving an assignment online with no instruction count as hours? How many hours?
When in doubt, take what you know, which is in person lectures online and reach the mandates. The children will suffer. The teachers will suffer. Administration/Government will meet their mandates.
In my opinion, having a lecture recorded is a wonderful boon, as you can go back and rewatch a section if it wasn't clear the first time.
But I don't know about you but I find I very rarely get around to watching things like conference video for sessions I missed live. You end up with a big backlog and it's easier just to ignore the whole thing.
I agree that for traditional meetings/conferences they're not super useful (though I often find myself enjoying presentations from tech conferences long after the conference was held). But that was a different scenario than I was defending.
Getting kids to do the same thing genuinely helps even if it's just "don't wear your bedtime clothes."
It's true that kids do better with structure, but I've not heard that "structure" is the reason for uniforms.
Not sure how four hours in front of a virtual lecture works for kindergarten, or why it was seen as a viable approach.
Seriously lamenting the lack of innovative thinking around this. What a wasted opportunity to do something truly interesting with education.
This stuff is hard, and so many classroom models fail that I'm not surprised that "replicate the one that works" is gaining traction.
The kids require supervision by parents on the other end of the call to achieve even close to this (the parents don't have the same "classroom management" skills), so I figure... "Might as well do it myself". That's the main Zoom vs. Kindergarten difference.
Not to mention that home is filled with lots of fun, distracting stuff that the kids otherwise wouldn't have access to during the school day in a classroom.
Our school is 100% distance learning. When they were going to allow distance learning and in person, they were planning to have completely separate classes for this so they could better optimize for your particular medium.
Not only is it going to be challenging for the kindergarten kids to stay focused on their class via chrome book, the SAME teacher is managing the kids in the classroom and the kids online. The kindergarten teachers each have an assistant too (as they did before Covid-19) so that helps a bit.
I am fortunate my wife stays at home with the kids. I can't imagine what it will be like for parents of kindergartners who both work, or parents with special needs kids or parents who don't speak English. I am supportive of social distancing in these times. But its going to be tough on the kids.
One improvement: the high schooler has some sessions with 90 kids (!!). So at least they can use their phones to goof off and text each other which they couldn’t do IRL.
There’s no easy answer to this, but I really wonder about the effects of this on kids, especially the younger ones. Kids, even liners, are pretty gregarious by nature, and there’s a lot of important physical contact among the little kids (and, for different reasons, teens :-)). Seems like there will likely be some developments issues down the road.
We've had a handful of school district customers sign up recently and use us to build aggregated status pages or send notifications to teachers and administrators when Zoom (or Blackboard or whatever) is down. So there seems to be a use case there beyond the "DevOps" market we currently cater to.