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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

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.

germinalphrase 6y ago
K-12? Are they expecting students to “sit in class” by watching a live zoom lecture?
- cpuguy83 6y ago
  They were using blackboard last year (ugh)... I think they are switching some to zoom.
- mfer 6y ago
  There are many districts that expect kids, including early elementary, to sit and stare at screens a majority of the day (with breaks for things like lunch).
  - pavel_lishin 6y ago
    Perhaps they're seeing how good kids are at doing that as long as cartoons are on the screen, and extrapolating.
- justinlink 6y ago
  Yes, some schools are planning on this. Breaks for lunch / recess. 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.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Both at work and in other professional activities, a number of workshops, team meetings, etc. I've been in, we've all pretty much collectively decided that three to four hours a day is about the most we can productively handle. We've done some combination of just paring back material and smearing things over more days. 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.
    - justinlink 6y ago
      I've had the same conversations and I've been warning my teacher wife that the path they are going down ignores what people in technology have already lived. 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.
- nathanyz 6y ago
  Yes, this is the plan they came up with. It is hybrid so there will be in-class kids and at-home learners all with the same teacher.
- greedo 6y ago
  Yes, my daughter is doing remote this year, but the majority of students are in class. So she has to watch a live video of the lecture. The district doesn't want to record the videos since they think students won't pay attention. They also periodically take attendance.
  - ajford 6y ago
    If they ultimately watch the videos later, what difference does it make whether they watch it live. 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.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      That's a nice theory and makes a lot of sense. 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.
      - ajford 6y ago
        The parent comment was talking about educational lectures, like in classroom settings. When I was in college, online ed was just taking off at my campus, and I took one CS class with online lectures. It was quite useful to be able to go back to a lecture in that situation. 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.
    - greedo 6y ago
      The administrators feel the students won't pay enough attention if they can simply watch the video later.
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  Some are also enforcing dress codes: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/08/us/pajamas-school-springfield-dress-code.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/08/us/pajamas-school-springf...
  - Spivak 6y ago
    I mean as adults this sounds silly but kids do better with that structure, it's why uniforms "work." I do all sorts of odd stuff as an adult to get into "work mode" and how I dress is part of it. And I do the same thing with pjs, they're a pavlovian trigger that it's time to go to bed. Getting kids to do the same thing genuinely helps even if it's just "don't wear your bedtime clothes."
    - bluedino 6y ago
      So do many adults...
      - Spivak 6y ago
        I'm with you. I need so much structure to be productive, but I also spent the entirety of my formative years in schools that had uniforms and strict time schedules and discipline so I didn't want to make any stronger claims because it's possible that my own experience gets cause/effect reversed.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I've been mostly working remote for long enough that I've pretty much dispensed with all the "props" and formal routines. But I certainly did things like dress for work when I first started working from home semi-regularly. I'd probably recommend anyone use "training wheels" at first.
    - pavel_lishin 6y ago
      > I mean as adults this sounds silly but kids do better with that structure, it's why uniforms "work." It's true that kids do better with structure, but I've not heard that "structure" is the reason for uniforms.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sailfast 6y ago
  Yes, which is why we made the hard decision to take our kids out and home school. (The fact that we can even consider this is a luxury? 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.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Strike the word virtual and you've just described school. Sure, there are schools that are trying different classroom methods but broadly kindergarten is lectures, worksheets, nap, lunch, and recess. I think your point stands that there's not much innovation in the world of k-12 but I don't think Zoom is what actually matters here. This stuff is hard, and so many classroom models fail that I'm not surprised that "replicate the one that works" is gaining traction.
    - sailfast 6y ago
      Maybe? The major, MAJOR difference is that if a kindergarten class is in front of a teacher, the teacher can see the class and there are consequences for misbehavior / disobedience and the teacher can manage the class. The teacher has tools for making the kids pay attention that don't really seem possible over a longer-term Zoom meeting. 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.
      - davidf560 6y ago
        There's another aspect too: when kids are in a classroom together, there's a peer-pressure effect. If all the other kids are listening quietly and doing their worksheets, the remaining children are likely to fall in line (not 100% guaranteed, of course). My observations of Zoom classes with young kids this spring is that this effect did not occur virtually. 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.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  It seems to vary. Our district has our kindergartner in front of a screen for about 2 hours (not continuous). Then they give us activities to do with our kids, at our convenience, that we submit via an app. The teacher reviews and comments on it. There's around 7 per day, but they aren't too difficult for our 5 year old: write 10 T's, read them a book, collect then count some stuff, etc. 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.
- darcyparker 6y ago
  I have a child starting kindergarten. 1/2 the class is attending in person M and Tu and the other 1/2 is via a chrome book and Google Meet. Wed all kids are attending via Google Meet (the classroom will be deep cleaned Wed). And then Th/Fr is like M/T, but the group that was in person is now at home and vice versa. Then they deep clean again on the weekend. (Their day is 6 hrs (less recess and lunch)). 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.
  - neap24 6y ago
    Similar situation here. We have been unaffected since my wife stays home and has homeschooled our kids for the past couple of years. But, there are a lot of parents in our neighborhood scrambling for a solution (and not seeing Kindergarten Zoom as a workable one) and even asking my wife if their child can join in on our homeschool.
  - bcrosby95 6y ago
    Our school started with 3 hours straight (with 10 minute breaks) infront of the screen for our Kindergartner. That quickly changed. I think families even with a stay at home parent will have an incredibly difficult time keeping a 5 year old online and infront of a screen for a total of 5 hours per day. Even 2 hours straight with a 10 minute break is not easy.
- cabaalis 6y ago
  Expecting? Doing. My 2nd grader included. It's going..fair..so far. No substitute for being in class.
- gumby 6y ago
  Sadly yes. Palo Alto has been doing this for the last couple of weeks (grade 7-12; dunno about younger). 10 minutes between classes; 30 for lunch. I don’t think it’s sustainable. 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.
  - knolax 6y ago
    Maybe we'll see a spike on the number of incels in 15 years.
    - sunopener 6y ago
      What's a spiked incel?
  - samcheng 6y ago
    Younger kids in PAUSD have significantly less screen time. My Ohlone first grader has a 30-minute session, a 15-minute session, and a 45-minute session today, scattered throughout the day.
- dylan604 6y ago
  I'm surprised there hasn't been noise about schools wanting Zoom to reinstate their eye tracking code so the teacher knows when Little Johnny isn't paying attention.
eitally 6y ago
Fwiw, most school districts also already have either MSFT Teams or Google Classroom licenses so switching away from Zoom shouldn't be too problematic for ad hoc lectures. 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).
- m-p-3 6y ago
  Hopefully Google picks up the pace quickly with those important features like the ability to force-mute everyone but the presenter.
- johnbatch 6y ago
  I’m really surprised Microsoft wasn’t able to get Breakout rooms working before the fall semester. Shows December 2020 on here now: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Microsoft%20Teams&searchterms=65332 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter... This showed “coming in fall”: https://educationblog.microsoft.com/en-us/2020/06/20-updates-for-microsoft-teams-for-education-including-7x7-video-and-breakout-rooms/ https://educationblog.microsoft.com/en-us/2020/06/20-updates...
bshep 6y ago
I made a web app to help my wife with our pre-K kids 7 zoom classes, it has made a huge difference and he is able to connect by himself most of the time. I have no idea how non-technical people can cope with this, its still insane but at least manageable.
- ChicagoBoy11 6y ago
  Say more (school admin considering deploying a custom webapp of the sort for our parents, where links/etc. are more easily laid out and managed for our audience).
colinbartlett 6y ago
That's interesting. My side project, StatusGator, monitors and aggregates status pages and I've been wondering recently if we should target the education... and how to. 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.

germinalphrase 6y ago

K-12? Are they expecting students to “sit in class” by watching a live zoom lecture?

cpuguy83 6y ago
They were using blackboard last year (ugh)... I think they are switching some to zoom.
mfer 6y ago
There are many districts that expect kids, including early elementary, to sit and stare at screens a majority of the day (with breaks for things like lunch).
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  Perhaps they're seeing how good kids are at doing that as long as cartoons are on the screen, and extrapolating.
justinlink 6y ago
Yes, some schools are planning on this. Breaks for lunch / recess. 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.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Both at work and in other professional activities, a number of workshops, team meetings, etc. I've been in, we've all pretty much collectively decided that three to four hours a day is about the most we can productively handle. We've done some combination of just paring back material and smearing things over more days. 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.
  - justinlink 6y ago
    I've had the same conversations and I've been warning my teacher wife that the path they are going down ignores what people in technology have already lived. 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.
nathanyz 6y ago
Yes, this is the plan they came up with. It is hybrid so there will be in-class kids and at-home learners all with the same teacher.
greedo 6y ago
Yes, my daughter is doing remote this year, but the majority of students are in class. So she has to watch a live video of the lecture. The district doesn't want to record the videos since they think students won't pay attention. They also periodically take attendance.
- ajford 6y ago
  If they ultimately watch the videos later, what difference does it make whether they watch it live. 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.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    That's a nice theory and makes a lot of sense. 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.
    - ajford 6y ago
      The parent comment was talking about educational lectures, like in classroom settings. When I was in college, online ed was just taking off at my campus, and I took one CS class with online lectures. It was quite useful to be able to go back to a lecture in that situation. 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.
  - greedo 6y ago
    The administrators feel the students won't pay enough attention if they can simply watch the video later.
pavel_lishin 6y ago
Some are also enforcing dress codes: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/08/us/pajamas-school-springfield-dress-code.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/08/us/pajamas-school-springf...
- Spivak 6y ago
  I mean as adults this sounds silly but kids do better with that structure, it's why uniforms "work." I do all sorts of odd stuff as an adult to get into "work mode" and how I dress is part of it. And I do the same thing with pjs, they're a pavlovian trigger that it's time to go to bed. Getting kids to do the same thing genuinely helps even if it's just "don't wear your bedtime clothes."
  - bluedino 6y ago
    So do many adults...
    - Spivak 6y ago
      I'm with you. I need so much structure to be productive, but I also spent the entirety of my formative years in schools that had uniforms and strict time schedules and discipline so I didn't want to make any stronger claims because it's possible that my own experience gets cause/effect reversed.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I've been mostly working remote for long enough that I've pretty much dispensed with all the "props" and formal routines. But I certainly did things like dress for work when I first started working from home semi-regularly. I'd probably recommend anyone use "training wheels" at first.
  - pavel_lishin 6y ago
    > I mean as adults this sounds silly but kids do better with that structure, it's why uniforms "work." It's true that kids do better with structure, but I've not heard that "structure" is the reason for uniforms.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sailfast 6y ago
Yes, which is why we made the hard decision to take our kids out and home school. (The fact that we can even consider this is a luxury? 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.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Strike the word virtual and you've just described school. Sure, there are schools that are trying different classroom methods but broadly kindergarten is lectures, worksheets, nap, lunch, and recess. I think your point stands that there's not much innovation in the world of k-12 but I don't think Zoom is what actually matters here. This stuff is hard, and so many classroom models fail that I'm not surprised that "replicate the one that works" is gaining traction.
  - sailfast 6y ago
    Maybe? The major, MAJOR difference is that if a kindergarten class is in front of a teacher, the teacher can see the class and there are consequences for misbehavior / disobedience and the teacher can manage the class. The teacher has tools for making the kids pay attention that don't really seem possible over a longer-term Zoom meeting. 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.
    - davidf560 6y ago
      There's another aspect too: when kids are in a classroom together, there's a peer-pressure effect. If all the other kids are listening quietly and doing their worksheets, the remaining children are likely to fall in line (not 100% guaranteed, of course). My observations of Zoom classes with young kids this spring is that this effect did not occur virtually. 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.
bcrosby95 6y ago
It seems to vary. Our district has our kindergartner in front of a screen for about 2 hours (not continuous). Then they give us activities to do with our kids, at our convenience, that we submit via an app. The teacher reviews and comments on it. There's around 7 per day, but they aren't too difficult for our 5 year old: write 10 T's, read them a book, collect then count some stuff, etc. 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.
darcyparker 6y ago
I have a child starting kindergarten. 1/2 the class is attending in person M and Tu and the other 1/2 is via a chrome book and Google Meet. Wed all kids are attending via Google Meet (the classroom will be deep cleaned Wed). And then Th/Fr is like M/T, but the group that was in person is now at home and vice versa. Then they deep clean again on the weekend. (Their day is 6 hrs (less recess and lunch)). 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.
- neap24 6y ago
  Similar situation here. We have been unaffected since my wife stays home and has homeschooled our kids for the past couple of years. But, there are a lot of parents in our neighborhood scrambling for a solution (and not seeing Kindergarten Zoom as a workable one) and even asking my wife if their child can join in on our homeschool.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  Our school started with 3 hours straight (with 10 minute breaks) infront of the screen for our Kindergartner. That quickly changed. I think families even with a stay at home parent will have an incredibly difficult time keeping a 5 year old online and infront of a screen for a total of 5 hours per day. Even 2 hours straight with a 10 minute break is not easy.
cabaalis 6y ago
Expecting? Doing. My 2nd grader included. It's going..fair..so far. No substitute for being in class.
gumby 6y ago
Sadly yes. Palo Alto has been doing this for the last couple of weeks (grade 7-12; dunno about younger). 10 minutes between classes; 30 for lunch. I don’t think it’s sustainable. 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.
- knolax 6y ago
  Maybe we'll see a spike on the number of incels in 15 years.
  - sunopener 6y ago
    What's a spiked incel?
- samcheng 6y ago
  Younger kids in PAUSD have significantly less screen time. My Ohlone first grader has a 30-minute session, a 15-minute session, and a 45-minute session today, scattered throughout the day.
dylan604 6y ago
I'm surprised there hasn't been noise about schools wanting Zoom to reinstate their eye tracking code so the teacher knows when Little Johnny isn't paying attention.

eitally 6y ago

Fwiw, most school districts also already have either MSFT Teams or Google Classroom licenses so switching away from Zoom shouldn't be too problematic for ad hoc lectures. 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).

m-p-3 6y ago
Hopefully Google picks up the pace quickly with those important features like the ability to force-mute everyone but the presenter.
johnbatch 6y ago
I’m really surprised Microsoft wasn’t able to get Breakout rooms working before the fall semester. Shows December 2020 on here now: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Microsoft%20Teams&searchterms=65332 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter... This showed “coming in fall”: https://educationblog.microsoft.com/en-us/2020/06/20-updates-for-microsoft-teams-for-education-including-7x7-video-and-breakout-rooms/ https://educationblog.microsoft.com/en-us/2020/06/20-updates...

bshep 6y ago

I made a web app to help my wife with our pre-K kids 7 zoom classes, it has made a huge difference and he is able to connect by himself most of the time. I have no idea how non-technical people can cope with this, its still insane but at least manageable.

ChicagoBoy11 6y ago
Say more (school admin considering deploying a custom webapp of the sort for our parents, where links/etc. are more easily laid out and managed for our audience).

colinbartlett 6y ago

That's interesting. My side project, StatusGator, monitors and aggregates status pages and I've been wondering recently if we should target the education... and how to. 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.