Google Meet has problems, tens of thousands of students without a lesson- Corriere.it

Tens of thousands of Italian students in the dark (and many more around the world) due to a collapse of the Google Meet video conferencing platform, one of the most used by schools for distance learning. Around 12:45 the system went haywire and students and teachers found themselves disconnected from their lessons on the most beautiful explanation of history or, for the lucky ones, Greek or physics questioning. Anyone who tried to connect to the site received a response: ‘An error has occurred. Please try later. There’s no more available info ‘. It is not a minor problem, but a global glitch of Google’s system: in minutes the hashtag #googledown became a major trend on Twitter, from mail services to search engines, from Youtube to Gmail, which lasted around one hour.

Students in the dark

The crash of the digital platform highlights one of the most recurring drawbacks during remote lessons: the continuous connection problems mainly attributable to lines that are not always excellent at home or, even in the case of a good wi-fi system. , from an overload when the whole family connects: children in class and parents at work smart. An objective difficulty that students sometimes try to take advantage of by accusing reception problems – “Professor, I can’t hear you”, “The line is down, Professor” – even when the problems do not exist. Little tricks that have undermined the climate of trust essential in the teacher-student relationship and have forced teachers to devise increasingly complicated (and sometimes humiliating) systems to ensure that children do not copy or allow their peers to suggest answers. The disruption of the line, dramatically true as in this case or supposedly, demonstrates once again the intrinsic limits of digital teaching, as repeatedly emphasized by pedagogues and psychologists who have long advocated for the return of high school students to class. , expected, if the situation does not worsen with the holidays, by January 7, 2021.
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Needless to say, the envy of all the students who were lecturing on other platforms that instead performed very well.