Over at AVC Fred Wilson just posted about Outschool's efforts to support students and teachers in the event of school closures due to the Coronavirus. All the details and relevant links are in the post.

I looked a bit into Outschool when Fred first wrote about them but never had a chance to do a deep dive.

Now, internet based teaching is not going to be as effective as in person teaching but I was thinking about how far things have come.

After superstorm Sandy, Stuy was closed for about a week. Instead of losing all the time my classes and I decided to try to do us some internet schooling. We used Google tools and things went pretty well.

I wrote about what we did and some concluding thoughts here and here.

Back then - 2012 - the technology was close but not quite there. Now, with tools like Zoom and I'm guessing Outschool, which is probably more fine tuned for education rather than meetings you have some nice all in one or at least most in one solutions. I had to use a YouTube broadcast and separate documents and chats. Today's tools tie all of those together along with screen sharing. Maybe Outschool even has a shared virtual blackboard - that would be pretty cool. Add in something like Trello and GitHub and we're really cooking.

It really reminds me that Google Wave was really a product ahead of it's time.

As I said above, internet teaching will not be as effective as live. It's more of a show and do rather than an interactive class and I go through some of the other issues in the my two posts linked above but we're getting better. Certainly way better than closing a school and doing nothing.

Hats off to Outschool for providing their services to the community. I hope few have to use them but am thankful they're there.