My reaction to the lockdown extension is exasperation - purely because it means two more days of home schooling. (I’m fine with the extra time from a public health standpoint) Exasperated parent thread follows ...

I love teachers but they’re not UX experts. Each school is reinventing the wheel on this, which seems silly. I can’t imagine how much of their own time they’ve spent trying to cobble a system together.

Firstly, we’re personally lucky. The kid has a chrome book & we have internet at home. As parents we’re also computer literate.

Here’s what my primary school kid has to navigate. Each week a timetable is given in a google slide document. Each individual lesson links to other google documents. Invariably each document contains an image of a worksheet the kid is supposed to ‘fill in’.

You can not fill an image in.

If you have a printer at home you’re sorted. Lucky you! Print out that image worksheet & fill it in. But you also need to remotely show your teacher your work for feedback. Got a scanner? Lucky you again!

Then you need to get your scanned - or photographed image for the scanner deprived back into the google slide. The email address the kids have for google classroom can’t receive emails. Got a USB stick - lucky you!

We have somehow given all ours away. Not that we had a printer or scanner to begin with.

Doing it without a printer ... most of the time you need to look a different page in the doc while you fill an image in (even it that was possible). Got an extra monitor? Lucky you!

Otherwise teach your primary school kid how to manage swapping between tabs and not lose their shit. Good luck with that. Also, have you seen how small chrome book screens are?

We’re talking three possible tabs. One for what they’re referencing, one for the worksheet image they should ‘fill in’ and one for the google slide document they’re making a text box in and typing their answers into because you can’t fill an image in.

We’ve tried something different. We screenshot each worksheet & chop it up by question. We paste each question into the google slide doc (the ‘home schooling workbook’) with an editable text box for answer (takes 40 mins each day). Text needed to be referred to pasted alongside.

It’s worked but I’m aware it’s something we can do because we’re confident with digital stuff. Somehow a primary school kid was supposed to self-manage this while parents work.

I do consider myself lucky. I have one kid at one school, not three kids at three different level schools with three different systems to navigate.

And I’m not exasperated at my kid’s school. The teachers are trying their hardest. UX is not their job. I think we need to think hard about online schooling & be prepared for future lockdowns/pandemics to make sure no kid gets left behind.