Online school has been a concept far before the coronavirus outbreak. It was proposed that we could simply move students online and therefore eliminate the need to pay for the brick and mortar buildings. You would think that with all this time to plan and refine the process, they could have gotten it right. Unfortunately not.
A common theme with online school is using clunky, unrefined software. Common offenders include Canvas and Google Classroom. My personal experience with Google Classroom was actually fairly decent. Canvas, not so much. The software is bulky and slow. It runs poorly on the district distributed Chromebooks and has so many menus and sub-menus you can't find your assignments. But I digress.
It seems like schools can't get much right. The district distributed Chromebooks are a great start, but these things need WiFi and even in this day and age not everybody has access to WiFi. Libraries are closed, restaurants are closed, basically, any place with public WiFi is closed. Schools have had adequate time to figure these things out. There should be no excuse, as my teachers tend to quote to me when the Chromebook crashes on me in the middle of a Google Meet.
Very insightful, Mr. Nations! Thank you for selecting this topic.
ReplyDeleteThank you very much!
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