I have had all my grandchildren, grand nieces and nephews here in the CTL compound since about March 12th.
Since they attend different schools in assorted cities and range from 1st graders to Law school, they are using many different platforms for distance learning.
Our obervations:
Teleconferencing works best when it is the instructor and no more than 3 students and the call lasts less than 30 minutes. Large groups have too many technology failures and the teacher can not mute the whole group and choose who to unmute. There is no raise a hand feature, so the teacher knows a student wished to ask a question.
I like Zoom and use it reguilarly for business and government meetings. It lets the teacher see the students. It is important to see facial expressions and determine if a concept is understood. The teacher can mute or unmute all. There is a raise a hand feature, so the teacher knows which students to call upon. There is also the capability for those without computers or devices with cameras to call into a Zoom meeting on their phones and a chat feature that lets participants type questions and/or comments for the group to see.
Other teachers are using a combination of Google Classroom and Google Meet. The classroom is good because student can check assignments, submit them as wee. They can share documents with teacher or parent for editing. The teacher use this year round in several of the schools and on Friday afternoon parents get an update showing work missing from the week and assignments die the next week, dates for quizzes and tests. Google Meet works like Zoom and allows the teacher to teach live and have students on camera and microphone responding as if they were all sitting in the regular classroom.
Being OOT, all the Day schools have had computer labs for about 40 years and the kids are taught to be proficient from an early age. We are lucky in hosting so many of the family that the older ones can tutor and teach the younger ones.
This past week I was asked by one law school to proctor my grandson’s final exams. The other Law school has a program where they keep the webcam on and can see the student as he types his exam on the laptop.
But as a word of warning for schools considering Zoom, there may not be enough bandwidth in a given home or neighborhood with so many working from home plus remote learning. Because I work from home quite often, as does Mrs. CTL we have a dedicated T1 connection and most of the older grands are plugged into the network, not usinf the wireless modems from the cable company which are slower/