I love teaching my child any topic under the sun, but having to help her learn using tools and lessons prepared by someone else that have no relationship to her interests BLOWS.

I can't imagine how other parents who are not as comfortable with computers or even have available devices for their children to learn on are doing this.

The kid's only worry is I'll make her stop all the other "classes" we invented while her school hadn't gotten their act together for distance learning.

Also, also, google classrooms is brilliant but it was not designed for children with no computer literacy. It's one thing to be dextrous with an ipad, another thing entirely to learn how to use a computer while trying to learn math.

It's a classic problem of acquiring domain knowledge and tool knowledge at the same time.

And tool knowledge barriers will most definitely get in the way of acquiring domain knowledge. It's as small as knowing how to rewind a video to understand what was said.

The service design aspect of this whole experience distresses me because there are so many failure points even before the student is actively engaged with a lesson.

I know how to recover from all because I design systems for a living and the patterns are so familiar to me I don't even stress about it, it's just annoying.

But I know 30 other parents in the exact same situation that are stuck and I'd like to help, but WHEN/HOW?

An example: Lesson is teaching her about antonyms with a game to drag words that match the term shown.

domain knowledge: meaning of antonyms, reading comprehension (easy concepts for her)

tool knowledge: using a touchpad (new to it, very difficult), dragging (didn't know how)

Then the unintended consequences of environmental issues that are neither of those problems: I gave her an old Choromebook that freezes (will change), the wifi keeps dropping (fixed), the game drop targets are uncalibrated so even if she's accurate it's janky and doesn't work