Being completely honest, as a teacher, I am embarrassingly dependent on the internet. It’s my plan once things slow down to develop a few internet free lessons, so when the internet goes down I won’t have to stare at my kids after the thirty minutes’ worth of material I have printed out and ask, so what do you want to do?
Teacher after teacher at school after school has told me they have faced the same issue, that for basically the better part of three days, three very important days when baseline assessments are supposed to occur the internet has been down.
You know I don’t want to come down too hard on the district, after all the start of school really caught us off guard, I mean who even knew what day it was? Oh wait, we all did, which means the district not being ready is inexcusable.
This is an amazing time of year, thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of students filled with excitement but it’s also a stressful time of the year, compounded by the lack of what has become a basic resource. A lot of people say, how you start is how you will finish, well we have started poorly.
The district should have treated the last few days like weather days as they got their act together.
There was a time, I never used the internet, and that became occasionally, and that became all the time, and that became I am dependent on it. I wish that wasn’t the case but it is, and I am not alone.
DCPS, Dr. Greene, we all know there are going to be bugs that have to be worked out the first few days and even weeks of school, it’s to be expected but what has happened this week, specifically with the internet, is an infestation of them and we have to do better.
This has been a problem for several years ongoing. Internet going out while we are required to do baseline testing. Focus going down, which means teachers are pressured to record that attendance or else, but we can't. Oopsie! Who knows what this year's problem is. However, we do know the district replaced ATT with another contractor as our internet provider. Among the many reasons, the most likely solution is that the new internet provider is not up to the job. And that is very worrisome. If DCPS does not make this a critical priority, like Japan just bombed Pearl Harbor and we need all ship makers to go full out, these problems could sabotage the FSAs come May 2019.
ReplyDeleteThe district is constantly touting the Oneview site as their end all- you can't have cloud based everything unless you have stable internet. As a computer teacher- this is devastating. Our AP Computer Science Principles curriculum is all online-last year this robbed far too much time from them. Of course I have alternate lessons, but we are online for every class- I can't reasonably be expected to have an alternate lesson for EVERY SINGLE CLASS in case of internet failure. They are too busy blocking educational tools like edmodo, google drive, etc. in an attempt to coerce teachers into onenote to take care of our basic connectivity issues.
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