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School districts take unplanned plunge into online learning

bostonherald.com

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Re: School districts take unplanned plunge into online learning

#101

Post by therealx »

suchire wrote: post #98
thescriptkiddie wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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)

Re: School districts take unplanned plunge into online learning

#102

Post by linsomniac »

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

Re: School districts take unplanned plunge into online learning

#103

Post by [deleted] »

ddlatham wrote: post #76
irrational wrote: post #8

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 yesterd…

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.

[deleted]

Re: School districts take unplanned plunge into online learning

#104

Post by Buttons840 »

tootie wrote: post #83
testfoobar wrote: post #70

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 traffi…

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…

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.

Re: School districts take unplanned plunge into online learning

#105

Post by [deleted] »

mlyle wrote: post #73
m4rtyr wrote: post #72

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.c…

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.

[deleted]

Re: School districts take unplanned plunge into online learning

#106

Post by mindfulgeek »

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.

Re: School districts take unplanned plunge into online learning

#107

Post by Balgair »

linsomniac wrote: post #102

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.

Re: School districts take unplanned plunge into online learning

#108

Post by karatestomp »

beefalo wrote: post #95
donw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: School districts take unplanned plunge into online learning

#109

Post by karatestomp »

gnicholas wrote: post #37

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…

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.

Re: School districts take unplanned plunge into online learning

#110

Post by karatestomp »

Digory wrote: post #28
Dumblydorr wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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.

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