Teacher's low-tech laptop hack to display handwritten notes for online class

That clearly hasn't happened either.

Surely you've been in a meeting room with more than about 5 people? All of those people have conflicting viewpoints, theories about the situation, risk analysis and so on.

Can you imagine being a board member who spent 30% of a school budget on remote learning only to have in-class instruction all year?

Hindsight is 20/20. School budgets are generally tight, their IT teams have less-than-desired-bandwidth, and they've already had to handle costs and challenges with the current situation such as getting mobile hotspots and video conferencing solutions up. Remember that not all kids have laptops or internet at home - and school IT gets to handle that situation too.

The problem is that a pandemic is an n-th order effect nightmare, with a distinctly low failure threshold based on covid's epidemiological parameters. A country's commander in chief needs to listen to scientific expertise & provide clear public communication and apolitical leadership to avoid this kind of calamity, which just didn't happen.

I imagine almost all the people planning this had very little practical experience with remote learning before this, and so had to learn about what it could and could not do well and implement a program to get all these resources to children.

That's something that many people here might be comfortable with, so I can understand why they may think this is the easy part, but let's flip this on it's head. How many people here, if instead of working out a digital solution and delivering to people were asked to work out a solution to have hundreds to thousands of children come in to a physical location, group into assigned categories for teaching, go to their individual rooms in these groups, and receive instruction for hours at a time with periods of play and lunch interspersed?

All the problems you might encounter in that scenario has equivalents for someone migrating from managing a fully in-person based teaching system to a fully, or even partially digital one. Whereas I might have problems knowing how to direct people as they arrive to the correct location effectively and efficiently, in a digital system they need to know how to find the students that are completely list in connecting to the classroom and never show up. Where I might struggle in making sure I had the appropriate staff at the correct locations to teach, they might struggle with the fact that not all students have digital accounts set up needed to connect (and not all parents are responsive to any contact during the summer).

Managing adults where you have a clear channel of communication to them that they are expected to pay attention to because it's their job is hard. I can only imagine what it's like to add a bunch of children in the mix (because you really are dealing with kids AND their parents) and have a sizable portion of the adults likely think "it will work out because it's their job, I'll just pay attention a couple days before school starts and do what they say, it's always worked out before".

I know I didn't want to read all the school emails coming to me over the summer (which reading between the lines mostly seemed to amount to "we're totally screwed but trying our best and we really hope school will be open because we have no idea how to do anything that we might need to".

Suggested standards: max class size

max admin to teacher ratio

standardized pay rate for teachers in each state

standardized credentialing

paid school lunches

standardized mandatory "recess"

standard list of "extras", let clubs handle the non-standard extras

no school sponsored sports, let them be PTO affiliated and funded

mandatory list of supplies for students and teachers.

Usually, not.

It's generally the first year of free, available education which most people take advantage of because it's free.

First grade is usually the first year of compulsory education (e.g., in California a student must be admitted to kindergarten at parent request if they turn 5 before September 1 of the school year and to transitional kindergarten if they turn 5 between September 2 and December 2, but compulsory education starts at age 6.)

It is perfectly acceptable in educated circles in the U.S. to state that kids from "disadvantaged families", should be taken out of their families' homes from 7 AM to 7 PM to get "additional enrichment opportunities", in other words, raised by the state.

It may well be that you could increase grades and test scores this way, but I have some serious issues with the degree to which we're comfortable separating children from their families, because we've decided that we know what's best for everyone.

Reminds me of how the American government made a big push in the second half of the 19th century to remove Native American children from their homes and send them to boarding schools to "civilize" them.

It is also parents who have to redirect kid back as the kid looses attention and wanders away (completely normal at kindergarten age).

If we’re hair picking students vs. teachers then it is likely political distinction.

My daughter has been doing online school for two years now with a school system that has been online only for about 10 years.

Their hack was to give the kids one assignment per day. A missed assignment = 1 absence. An assignment turned in a day late = 1 tardy. The teachers post the weeks assignments on weekend (before Monday morning) and it's up to the kids to determine when/how they will get them done (which is why she attends this school, as it gives her a lot of flexibility to do the other things she is interested in).

Holy crap this is an incredibly stupid thing to be forced to do.

Cheap sports shoes so the poor kid isn't left out after he lost his shoes but can't afford new ones, pens etc for children who lose them and don't have friends who will lend them one, tampons or sanitary towels for girls whose parents refuse to accept she's growing up.

Example article on this: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nearly-1-in-10-school...

Anyway as others have pointed out, if the schools won't fund that, should the teachers be shelling out for supplies like that themselves? Where's the excessively rich tech companies now? They could do some dank virtue signaling and give free hardware to teachers for example. They've earned tens of billions in the past month anyway, if the government isn't doing anything for society, it's down to the companies.

... And you don't even know if this is a problem you need to solve. Did you do an analysis to see if a) this is a wide-scale problem and b) that an expensive hardware solution is the actual answer versus, say, shipping an extra webcam that teachers can position in any way they want, or shipping a cheap plastic clip with a mirror that replicates what this teacher did.

I don't think taping a CD to a laptop is perfect, but you can imagine all the technical difficulties that come from using something like a Wacom tablet like home, right?

Drivers/software/OS support for the tablet? What program do they use to write in? How do they share that with attendees? How reliable is all this?

There's a simplicity to keeping it completely analogue which has much less failure scenarios. I don't have a link, but a saw a tweet where a teacher (?) had 3D printed a mount for a mirror to put on the laptop lid, a more polished version of this same thing, basically an overhead projector for a webcam.

The sensible path of course would be for the school (district) to provide its teachers for job related expenses. A home office budget should be part of that, especially these days.

Needs additional software and mental overhead to get the sketches on screen.

That's half a day's pay for a newly qualified teacher in the US.

Is it a real complaint? I don't see anybody claiming it's all the teacher's responsibility. I don't see that from the parents, or school board, or any government of any level.

I'm really struggling to see how the pencil/CD/coin solution is better. I wouldn't be surprised if more teachers have compacts readily available than CDs. I think the whole CD thing is going viral because it falls into the "clever lifehack" bucket, i.e. it is optimized for hackiness virality while not actually being the best/simplest solution to the problem. But a simple compact taped to a laptop screen isn't as interesting of a "hack", and thus doesn't go viral.

(Also -- conveniently -- the layer of glass/plastic on compacts is super thin, basically just barely enough to prevent the aluminum or whatever from oxidizing and from you getting the mirrored surface all fingerprinty, so it doesn't seem to cause noticeable internal reflection problems. And it's thinner than the layer of plastic on CDs, which are NOT first surface mirrors, which is easily provable by scratching the bottom of the CD and noting that you're scratching the plastic and not the reflective material directly.)

AFAIK The reflective layer is on the top of the disc - where logos and graphics are. From the clean side you are looking at this metallic layer through the plastic.

And you're overstating how much harder it would be to prop up a tiny cheap mirror. I bet you could do it with two pencils taped together at an angle, with one taped to the back of the laptop and the other taped to the back of the mirror.

The idea that the Moderate is the new third party is novel though. But it's too early to tell if that's true, since Democrats are mostly still moderate and if the Trump Republican party collapses, the moderate wing of the Republican party might resurge.