Video conferencing has allowed teachers to connect to students no matter where they are. Students have been able to effectively learn from home since last March, and I believe that we should still take advantage of these features into the future. Going forward, video conferencing would allow for students to still be present in class if an illness prevents their attendance at school or if the school district were practicing a snow day. It could potentially also incentivize a number of non-public cyber school students to attend public school online (which I’ll go over more in another post).
This technology can also be used to record class lectures, so that students who had to miss class and/or don’t quite understand class concepts can watch the pre-recorded lessons online, making it easier for students to make up missed lectures, and all teachers have to do is press the record button and post the recording at the end of class. It’s a win-win. Having access to this also allows students to create their own meetings to work on group projects from home with video conferencing, as well as student organizations can meet virtually if time during the school day does not permit. For students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, there is a feature for live captioning. Even if the student is in the classroom, they can log on to view live captions as they learn. Finally, screen sharing and breakout rooms allow students to share their work and collaborate from anywhere, which is a great tool for presenting work and collaborating in groups.
By this, I understand that this technology doesn't come free, however through a financial breakdown, the cost is not as large as one would think. Of course, fitting these technologies into an existing budget would be optimal, however even if it doesn't fit, the costs are next to minimal. For example, Google Meet is $8.00 per active user with all the features. In a school district with 150 teachers and 3,000 students, they would need 3,150 accounts at a total of about $25,200. If there are 25,000 taxpayers, the cost per taxpayer would only be about one dollar, which is a small price to pay to give students a peace-of-mind that these features are still readily available.
Overall, I hope you can see how the benefits heavily outweigh the costs when it comes to keeping video conferencing tools funded in schools post-pandemic, as this will only positively impact the learning process for both students and teachers no matter what grade level or subject area.
Google Meet Pricing Source: https://apps.google.com/intl/en/meet/pricing/
Picture source: https://member365.com/5-video-conferencing-systems-to-keep-your-team-connected/
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