Zoom problems

The U.S. is fighting off a pandemic and everyone must stay in their homes. Schools must resort to online teaching through third party sources. This is new ground for EPISD and they don’t know what will happen. Zoom has become a very popular source for communicating with students. But after some people spam inappropiate content in these virtual classrooms, the districts promptly shuts it down, instead of dealing with the ones responsible.

Ever since spring break became extended indefinitely, the district has become unfocused and rushed in their ambition to quickly get everyone into a virtual classroom to finish the school year.

“There’s not a lot of communication” Senior Student Kenneth Gonzalez said. “It seems like the district only communicates through voice messages and aren’t very clear on what they want both us students and teachers to do. They keep making new rules and changing their minds on what they want to be done.”

While it is unclear just what transpired in those classrooms to cause the district to shut down such a valuable communication service as Zoom. Both students and teachers are unclear on what the point of it was.

“It doesn’t make much sense,” Astronomy teacher Troy Pavoggi said. “The same problems that happened in Zoom, can happen in any other service we use. It’s like they think that once we switch to a new platform, all the people who want to troll and mess around with online teaching will just magically go away, and not find another way to ruin it. I think the district is severely underestimating people’s potential.

This has left many people concerned for the future of virtual teaching and what the district will do if the same problems happen again.

“So they want us to use Microsoft Teams,” German teacher Juan Pinón said. “But like what if someone else starts spamming the chats? Are they going to make us switch again and again every time something inconveniencing happens? Because those communication apps and programs take some time to learn since they’re all different. I hope this is the one and only time they make a decision like that.”