Ditto to CTL Lawyer’s comments. There are several remote learning “virtual meeting” classrooms available but I’m guessing 90 percent of the schools (frum and secular) are using Zoom.
However, its really important that the teachers have been trained on using zoom or else it becomes a real circus (which not surprisingly the kids quickly learn to exploit ).
Obviously, its very unlikely that some of the older rebbeim will be able to quickly adopt to the technology (especially if they’ve never used a computer) but the younger generation should be able to pick it up really quickly. The basic options allowing muting and shared screens are very intuitive.
For those families fortunate enough to have a high speed connection, adequate bandwidth should not be a problem. For others with conventional cable connections or cellular-satellite hotspots or those living in high-rise buildings wired with a centralized cable network, I’m hearing that there is brequent buffering and getting disconnected frequently.
Beware of some of the other software being offered. For example, one of the largest and wealthiest school systems in the country had planned to use the Blackbaud system starting several weeks ago. I t has been an unmitigated disaster and the teachers have gone rouge and using their own Zoom accounts for ad hoc instruction while the school system struggles to fix their problems. There are some really top notch systems from MicroSoft and Google but they are more for business use and not as intuitive as zoom.
I’m obviously NOT a fan of “teleconferencing” and really don’t understand why the parents would not recognize that their kids are not getting the benefits of interactive and visual learning they can simply never get over a phoneline.
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