I teach on zoom every week, and the UI is head and shoulders above every other competitor for screen share and annotation.

Google meet, and jitsi meet are both depressingly bad for this use case.

Agreed; I also teach virtually, across a number of platforms, and Zoom is the one that just works easily and intuitively for everyone. Screen sharing and breakout rooms are a pain in all the other tools I've tried.

It's not my favourite piece of software, but for virtual teaching, it is head-and-shoulders above the competition.

I also taught on zoom -when I had connection issues I had no idea how to reconnect to a dropped call. Meanwhile students where thrown out of the call when I took to long.

Compared to google meet it all felt like a bad joke.

I've been tempted to pay someone to pour a concrete pad and buy a few to try and build a cabin on. With prices that low it's worth looking at.

Do careful research. Many have done that, but the negatives of containers for that purpose are rarely stated.

Building a cabin on top of containers would seem to resolve a lot of problems ascribed to building into containers.

This still happens now. So I'm quite sure we'd see it happen.

Integrity involves placing our duties to others in the proper order.

Sometimes that means doing stuff to benefit "your own." sometimes that means blowing the whistle on something. It really depends on the context.

There's mountains of paper, or proprietary software used for these tests. And that's before we pay for graders and monitors(and many schools need a few extra hands to do the test according to standard due to crowding).

The role of attention in our ability to test well shouldn't be underestimated.

I bet the same children could produce great results with a complete gamified test that used various tricks to pull their attention back to it.

I strongly disagree. Math and other stuff such as reading or writing requires focus. That's what is degrading. Kids can't focus anymore, not by choice but because they're simply unable to do it (even for stuff they like).

I think we agree, but I expressed it poorly.

Focus/Attention and patience are the skill that is degrading and proficiency in it is probably the pre-requisite for any successful growth in most other academic skills.

I'd be curious to see if those skills are being explicitly taught in preK and Kindergarten.

Kids can play games with complicated puzzles for hours. You can make games that teach math in this way and I am sure they'd be a big hit.

My kids play some gamified educational games and loved them.

Do the same with a whole class of students, and then we'll talk...

Remote learning that was "online first" reflected the erroneous idea that most American homes have internet access. We taught in a county where 50% of families don't have internet, and 20% don't even have a land line in 2020-2021.

The decline in learning was astonishing. Many of these children simply did not do any reading at all for a whole year.

> The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring.

> The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19. Loveless said he hoped future analyses of how kids learned during and after the greatest disaster in K-12 history wouldn’t overlook the “deeper,” persistent stagnation that preceded it.

So my school district's last day of in person instruction was March 12, 2020. Which leads me to wonder if the plan was to end testing in March 2020, or if testing was ended because schools were being shutdown and testing wasn't feasible.

If testing for the 2019-2020 school year stopped rather than completed, then you've got a data problem because it's not clear that tested performance is independent of scheduling.

Also, even if the testing was all completed as scheduled, COVID-19 was on at least some student's minds throughout February, which could reduce test scores. It can be difficult to focus on testing when a not yet declared pandemic is starting up.

True, but this doesn't apply to the article:

> The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring.

Which is why we never hear these horror stories about phishing attacks trying to get people to send things to the wrong account.

The fact is that in many, perhaps most cases of theft the Government isn't able to do much more than punish someone they think did the crime, maybe they can recover the assets, just as often those assets are evidence and you don't get them back for years.

What would you consider to be "necessary GraphQL"

Nothing. But the utility it provides is a unification layer for heterogeneous data sources to enable ad-hoc queries on the consumer side.

Are you Facebook?

Pretty much this - I can see why Facebook use it but I wouldn't have gained much from GraphQL in any of my jobs.

Given the interminable arguments they have about "who counts as white" and their racial anxieties I'm sure they're more aware, on average, of the differences between a Texan, and a Californian, or a Scottsman and A Frenchman than those of us who focus on finding what we have in common and being good neighbors.