[ExI] Fwd: year round school

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com> 

>...I am lucky to know the kind of students who make stepping stones out of stumbling blocks.  But I see plenty of students who find ways to turn stepping stones into stumbling blocks.  Some step up, some fall down.   spike


As with any new technology being used by a lotta people, new and fun ways to do things are discovered.  Online learning using Zoom is a great example.  Google classroom is even better in some ways, but I know more about Zoom, so this essay is mostly about that platform.

I mentioned in an earlier commentary that in current public schools, students are required to attend (so their cameras must be on and the student must appear in the field of view to verify presence) but are not actually required to participate in order to get a passing grade.  The students can sign up to be graded on a pass/fail basis this year.  If a student is satisfied with her GPA, there is no compelling reason to not use P/F grading, ja?  Some go into this year with a 4.0, clearly no way to improve, plenty of ways to fumble, take the safe P which does not calculate into GPA.

Zoom has a background feature where it somehow does face recognition and shows only the face.  This feature works, even if the camera can only see the top of the head (anyone here know how the heck that works (I can report that it does work well.))  With background running, you can't tell where the student is located.  My son went to a dentist appointment yesterday, took his ChromeBook with him with Zoom running, attended class on the trip over, during the preliminaries at the office and kept the camera running right up until the dentist arrived.  Cameras can be turned off temporarily (which is a good thing (a most advisable thing in some circumstances (if one is a news commentator for instance in a meeting with colleagues.)))  The teacher and classmates couldn't even tell he was away from his desk.  

Some use a phone to attend meetings, or go somewhere.  Usually you can tell when someone is walking.  If they don't have backgrounder on, then one can see trees passing by, dead giveaway, but more common is that the person appears to be looking up at about pi/4 radians, and rocking left and right.  She's walking, not in class.

The camera and screen are usually two separate things, and need not be in the same direction.  A Zoom meeting can show the participant in side view for instance, and some do.  Often the camera is the phone, so she can take it into the bathroom, on mute so the meeting people cannot hear the flush (and some do (it is hard to tell when someone does that (if they know how to use their phones correctly.)))  

One of my son's classes requires two separate devices, each with a camera, to take tests.  Reasoning: their school-issued ChromeBook has a camera, but a second camera is required to watch the test space and verify the student isn't cheating.  The test question goes up on the ChromeBook screen, the second device watches everything.  The process works.

spike