Notes from the undergrounded

I am still learning this whole video teaching thing and in some ways, it can do the job, but there are other areas in which it is deficient. I have seen contradictory information about scheduling learning times vs. allowing students to connect at their own pace, about assigning fixed work and lots of it vs. assigning significantly less and very different work and other basic educational (and paradigmatic) binaries. I don't know where I stand or where others will tell me to stand, but I want to keep track of my learning curve on this, so bear with me. You are in quarantine. What other choice do you have?

We are using Zoom and it is not horrible. But, and I have tried to pass these concerns along, there are glitches.

Sharing screens and limiting who can annotate is tough. The white board app initially refused to appear when I said that only I could write on it, and for other annotation tools, I believe that permissions are all or nothing.

People still get muted for no reason and unmuting them doesn't always work. I, on the whole, prefer to keep students unmuted -- the ability for them to interject, or add something without having to raise a hand and wait to be called on more closely mirrors how I run my classroom. Unfortunately, incidental noise can hurt our ability to hear other people who are talking. One student shifting his computer on his desk, or putting his phone down on his bed can take over a room and it isn't always easy to spot the source of noise and mute selectively.

Attendance is spotty at best -- students come in and out, so keeping track of them after initial attendance has been taken is very difficult.

On my screen (and I only have 1 computer to work on) I can't see 49 people on gallery view. That option is greyed out for me. I see up so 20 or so in gallery view -- sometimes when I have over 16 people present, I only see those 16 (with no "second page"). And because students keep moving in and out, and talking moves a student to the forefront, I lose track of students.

Students are supposed to have their cameras (and microphones) on -- unless I mute them. Here are some excuses which I have heard:

a. I am on a desktop so I have no camera installed
b. my camera (my software) is broken
c. I am in a room with others and it is noisy so I am staying muted
d. My room is dark so you can't see anything


Keeping students attentive and or focused in really tough. We are encouraging them to have access to other screens so they often are fixated on those other screens. Even if they have the video room open on a single, primary screen, they can have it minimized and be doing other things on their primary screen and yet appear to be paying attention. I have students who access on their phones and then say that they can't get chat messages, or open linked websites while maintaining presence in the video component. One had to exit and start up (and join via) a computer. This adds to instructional time. It is also harder to make sure students are progressing through assigned work. I have more students do the whole "wait...what are we doing now?" thing repeatedly, or ask questions just answered because they weren't fully paying attention or the audio didn't make someone else's question easy to hear. [if any teacher gets fooled by a virtual background picture/gif of a student, then that teacher deserves no mercy, but the students are trying to fool us and with people in and out, they can fool us because we can't check consistently]

There is pressure to use outside, third party add-ins. These are not resources that I use on a day-to-day basis when I teach so jumping in to the video-mode AND having to integrate unfamiliar technologies is doubly daunting. As a note, understand that I don't use those other options because I am a technophobe, but because they don't arise organically in my teaching method. This is asking for major shifts in how I approach the classroom. As a parallel, students do not seem comfortable with chat boxes alongside video teaching. I tried adding in a third-party component today and the students found it glitchy and hard to work and incorporate into the classroom. We will keep trying tomorrow and see if this can flip the source of content to students and if it can change the nature of assessments.

I am trying to keep my video room open as a drop in center, but to do so means keeping it in the background (with my camera off so that no one accidentally sees my reaction to stupid memes). But the room closes automatically after 40 minutes of inactivity.

This is not homeschooling. In homeschooling, a student doesn't wander into the wrong room.