How Modesto schools tackled crashes, glitches and ‘quirky’ discovery that began year
With its biggest tech fires put out by the third day of school last week, Modesto City Schools leaders said Monday that teachers now can really get down to the business of education.
Superintendent Sara Noguchi and members of her team spoke Monday morning about the academic year’s distance-learning start. The district’s board of education was to receive an update at its meeting Monday night, and MCS will host an online community forum Wednesday afternoon at 5:30 to address families’ questions and concerns.
Modesto City Schools started its new year Monday, Aug. 10. As of Friday, 92.3% of its students were connected online, Noguchi said.
Last week and over the weekend, district and school officials made a “full-court press” to identify every student who had not logged in and reach them by phone or a home visit, the superintendent said.
By Friday, the families of 362 students shared that they do not have internet, though of those kids, 269 logged in to the district’s learning platform, Schoology, by some means. “We know that we still need to reach out to them because we don’t know if they’re logging on via one of our parking lots that have been equipped with WiFi or was it their phone hot spot,” Noguchi said.
The district continues to work to reach the remaining 93 students who never logged in. What she thinks will be learned is that some of those students have moved out of the district, and some have moved in with other family members, Noguchi said.
Families without internet are being offered several options by Modesto City Schools, including the $10-a-month Internet Essentials service through Comcast, said Russell Selken, the district’s chief technology officer.
Because videos, interaction with teachers and access to technical resources are so important to distance learning, a home internet connection is the best option, Selken said. “However, if we get down to where for various reasons (students don’t have home internet service) — they’re homeless, they’re moving from house to house, they don’t have the financial resources — the principals are now at the point where they’re assisting with their staff in physically delivering hot spots to those students in those families.”
At this point, Noguchi said, the district is not planning to have to provide any paper learning packets because officials believe all students soon will be connected via internet.
The first few days of school weren’t always smooth sailing even for teachers and close to 30,000 students who were able to connect. There were, at least, frozen videos and choppy audio.
Through Facebook Messenger last week, parent Kristina Graham Blom told The Bee, “First day was ROUGH! Server crashed, couldn’t sign in on school-issued device, had to log in from personal devices (thankful we have those items), still issues intermittently. But the wrinkles are getting ironed out.”
Another MCS parent, Sarah Sanders, was having a harder time in her home, and not because of just technical hurdles: “This is awful for us. Distance learning with 4 kids (kindergarten and second, fourth and fifth grades) is a nightmare. Constantly getting kicked off and reloading. Luckily, my oldest doesn’t need much help, but my younger ones, I’m literally running from room to room to make sure they’re on task. They can’t be in the same room, and they have all these supplies. I’m trying to make sure they have the right ones, same page, etc.”
Technical difficulties, please stand by
There were two core pieces of equipment that posed challenges on the first day of instruction, Selken said. One was an internet protocol security system. “We do our due diligence in terms of safety and security and filtering,” he said, and the IP security server is rated for over 30,000 devices at one time. “But evidently, it didn’t want to see 30,000 on Monday. It was was having a bad Monday, so it caused a lot of them to get misconnections, kind of like a busy signal that you’d get on your phone in the old days.”
The problem was identified in an hour or so, he said, and upgrades began immediately. By Tuesday afternoon, the IP security system had two additional servers.
The second big problem was having 30,000 students go to a “common launching point” on the district’s website before being redirected to their individual school websites and Schoology, Selken said.
Add to those issues “a whole gamut of little things,” he said, and the district got more than 3,500 calls and took 5,000 work orders. Some families still are having trouble with the speed of their internet service, so are reminded that their providers can give them a new piece of equipment for free. Some providers have equipment incompatible with the latest Chrome devices given to 12,000-plus students, Selken said, meaning the district had to remotely “do a pushback in terms of the latest drivers so that those devices would work.”
One “quirky” problem discovered is that some tools, like Microsoft Teams, don’t perform well when a device is using its battery power. Connections cleared up when devices were plugged into a wall outlet.
Getting students ‘ready to learn’
As Selken illustrated, virtual instruction has meant a learning curve for teachers, too, said Brad Goudeau, associate superintendent for education services. With tech issues being cleared up, teachers now can focus on pedagogical challenges, he said.
In any school year, the first couple of days are largely spent with teachers laying out things like classroom procedures, expectations from students, and more. All those things apply to distance learning, as does instruction on how students should interact with one another and the teacher virtually, such as coming into Microsoft Teams with their microphones muted.
“Starting the school year, these first couple of weeks are really about connecting with students, making sure not only that they have the internet but that they are okay,” Goudeau said. “This is a very stressful time, there’s a lot of anxiety in the system for everyone. ... As we get into the coming weeks, then we will shift more to the to the instruction of the standards. But for right now, we want to make sure that we’ve got all of those pieces in place so that we can do the best job we can with students who are ready to learn.”
Noguchi said she knows there are a lot of questions out there among parents. Wednesday’s live online forum will be about answering those questions and asking families what they need for successful distance learning. “We’ll take that information and look to see if we can identify some themes and then work provide those supports.”
The access link for the hourlong forum is bit.ly/Aug19-MCSForum.
This story was originally published August 17, 2020 at 1:53 PM.
