A thread on “live” remote teaching:
I did live clubs and meetings with students this spring and agree that in the dystopian nightmare we’re in video meetings are a “better” tool for communicating with kids than posting assignments. But...

There are serious privacy & liability issues that have yet to be addressed. I know of a teacher where a students’ parent walked by her live meeting fully in the nude. Could she be held accountable for this?

Who is supervising kids when you are live teaching? What if they get hurt? What if they share their screen with something disturbing? Who is responsible?

What if teachers don’t feel comfortable with students and their parents seeing into their homes? We can’t make assumptions about the home lives of school staff. Not all staff have a quiet place where they can be uninterrupted.

What about students who don’t want people seeing into their homes? Or who don’t have the internet capacity to join live meetings? What happens when a teachers internet shuts out and the kids are left in the zoom unsupervised?

This questions aren’t insurmountable, but I see a lot of journalists focusing on the q of whether teachers will be mandated to do “live teaching” when I think it’s much more important to ask: how will you build relationships? How will you connect?

I also know parents who are not comfortable with their kids on video at all. If live teaching is mandated, will those kids miss out? What protections are in place so that meetings won’t be recorded by participants and put on social media?

There are other ways to connect with kids: outdoor learning or outdoor meet ups, phone calls, mail, socially distanced home visits. We should think about what we can do to meet students needs—how do live video meetings fit into that while protecting kids & staff privacy.