Reply to What am I missing about the difficulty of distance learning?

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "What am I missing about the difficulty of distance learning?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why can't they just have the teachers in the classrooms with a camera live streaming the classes? It would just be like a regular class except students would be at home.
The kids could then cycle through each of their 8 periods each day.[/quote]

They can’t afford soap in my school district. How do you think think they can afford cameras in every classroom. Here is a partial list of things we need before cameras: air conditioning that actually works, clean bathroom, paper towels, soap, sufficient bottled water (lead in the pipes), a functional dehumidifier in our building (the walls and floors are slick with moisture when the a/c runs), no mold, no dripping water causing mold, a classroom for every teacher (we are close to 200% capacity), one-to-one devices, a FT nurse, more paras, substitutes so we don’t have to combine classes or pull other teachers in to sub), security at school, more money for supplies (we run out of copy paper by April), a good curriculum, effective rodent and pest control (who needs a class pet when you have lots of them), money to renovate our school because we are crammed in like sardines, technology in the classroom (most Smartboards don’t work because when the bulb blows out, they are too expensive to replace).....................[/quote]

Don't you just need an iPad or a laptop with zoom?[/quote]

Think about it--how would a teacher instruct a class in person and stream the class using just an iPad or laptop with zoom? Who will hold the iPad and follow the teacher around as they teach the students in the class? Even if the teacher stayed in front of the class, he or she would be limited to the area covered by the laptop camera and microphone, which is limited to the device screen.

[/quote]

Yeah, you'd definitely need a separate camera, or else the teacher would be stuck sitting down behind the computer screen the whole time.

And even if you just set up a separate camera, they'd still need to monitor both the kids in the classroom and the ones in the "Hollywood Squares" on the screen, to be sure everyone was engaged and actively participating. They'd need to be constantly ducking back behind the screen to use the zoom interface to mute/unmute kids, share documents, monitor who's using the "raise hand" feature, let latecomers into the Zoom room, etc.

It could work if you had a separate camera, and someone else to run the zoom portion and troubleshoot any tech issues. But even if you could project the zoom kids onto the promethean board, the online kids still wouldn't see the kids in the classroom, just the backs of their heads in the Zoom view of the teacher. They'd hear their classmates (but probably on a lag, given wifi limitation), but not be able to see them face to face. So it wouldn't be like having one big class, but two separate ones with an open door in between.

Honestly, having one teacher do simultaneous zoom and in-person teaching would be an exercise in futility. It would be impossible to manage the tech, control what is essentially two separate classrooms, and still do any kind of effective teaching.

I sometimes provide research assistance for professors who regularly teach distance-learning classes at a university, and they have someone else to manage the hardware and monitor the software during the class. They're not trying to run the tech and teach the class at the same time, never mind trying to monitor two classes full of first graders.[/quote]
You better believe I'm not buying a single eraser for my classroom this year if the district decides they can afford to spend millions of dollars on classroom cameras.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics