New Experience: Distance Learning

Hello, welcome back!

This whole Corona Virus thing has been quite the ride, and I am sure everyone is sick of hearing about it. But don’t worry, I won’t be talking about it, I will only be talking about its effect on my learning.

At first, there were rumors of MAYBE getting a couple of days off to clean the school. And then BAM, no school for 9 days. And then BOOM, no school until at least the 31st. I don’t think anyone saw that coming, especially so quickly. And now they are talking about cancelling schools until at least the end of April. I even saw an article saying they were probably going to cancel for the rest of the year. However, when I say cancel, I don’t mean we aren’t doing anything for school – old people don’t like it when we don’t have school. Instead of everyone physically going to school, we are now learning and doing assignments digitally, all part of Digital Learning.

At first I thought this meant we would be meeting as a class every day, all in a video conference or something, and we would do the lesson then. Instead, since they (old people on the Board of Ed.) didn’t approve us to that, we are restricted to learning on our own, either through sites like Gizmos which show us a video and have us answer questions as we watch, or by doing tasks like annotating an article and then submitting notes. On top of all that, the sites that we are approved to use (approved by old people on the Board of Ed., sites made by old people) generally don’t work, like Schoology Conferences, probably because the site creators are used to building sites in HTML and CSS on a 56K dial up modem, disregarding helpful tools like JavaScript, Java, Python, and SQL. Oh well, it is what it is (unless platforms like Discord get approved, maybe I should start a Change.org post since that seems to be a trend lately).

“So, you are stuck with mostly inefficient and outdated platforms to learn, how are you making it work?” Great question, Graham. With the help of our teachers through email, and everyone being understanding since this is new to all of us, we are doing quite well. There is a lot of fine tuning to be done, such as setting an appropriate work load, but overall, we are all learning what we need to be learning.

Here is where I have been doing all my work, I have a cozy little setup with plenty of capability:

Thanks for checking in! Stay healthy and stop touching your face! If you want to see a cool video on how germs spread, go to this link: Mark Rober: How to See Germs

The person in the video, Mark Rober, makes tons of awesome science content. He has a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from USC, and he worked at NASA for 9 years, working on things like the Mars Curiosity Rover. He is part of a huge community of scientists and engineers on YouTube who teach people like me tons of new skills.