Replies

Why do you want to eliminate the audio?

Webcams don't normally include audio.

Why do you think you can't evaluate teacher performance from watching and listening to them. How can kids look like they're paying attention 6 hours a day without improving their attention?

Simple. You stare in the direction of the teacher and let your mind wander. You don't evaluate performance by polling a schools 20 classrooms over a 10 minute interval. You walk in from the back of the class, listen, and take notes. It's been done before. But perhaps you would prefer the school administrator who sits in his office all day channel surfing and commenting on what he sees with an intercom if you're really lucky. Nevertheless, the "level of presentation" would be less of an issue if school systems didn't insist on putting slow learners and kids who are running behind in with the achievers and the clever kids who get bored with the slow pace.

Sure, teaching certification couldn't possibly be improved by including a few snips for real world problems or solutions. Excuse me for suggesting that there's room for improvement.

A webcam running 6 hours a day isn't a few "snips". It's a waste of time.

"...if your parent is kind of pillar of society that is fond of watching taped episodes of Jerry Springer." You do know we're discussing webcam, not just taped video right? Why would you assume that it would be Jerry Springer parents that would watch the most?

Because no one who is normal is going to spend six hours of their day watching the class their kid is in. If you want to know what your kid did in school, bloody well ask them and expect a straight answer from them. If you need to rely on a webcam instead, there's something wrong with you, and if you feel the need to watch live webcams during the course of your working day, you're going to be the first guy to be laid off.

Why can't you imagine the benefit of a teacher going back and snipping the part where a kid flipped her off or called her a name few hours earlier after the kid denies it?

Any teacher who lies or spends their time engaging in petty spats with students they don't like should be canned immediately, tenure or no. 99% percent of the time, the student in question is lying and the teacher has every reason to complain. This means that the student should be disciplined, not made the defendent of a de-facto civil suit. If the student is a constant problem, the student should be removed so that the teacher can get back to teaching instead of policing.

Every other year or so, so-called "educators' will con a school into introducing wonderful new technology that will solve all their problems: television, satellite/cable, web surfing, graphing calculators, vcr's (now remember kids, if you rack up enough smiley faces, you'll get to watch this R rated horror flick!)--- you name it, they've tried it. Then there's always another gratuitous safety feature added to the school buses, the same school buses that stall in the winter so that one quarter of the students are two hours late. Computers are a special case in that a portion of the students knows 10 times as much as all the other students and the teachers put together. The nice thing about expensive new technology is that it gets you a puff piece in the local newspaper and distracts everyone from the practical issues involved in not running a school into the ground. In particular, the curriculum suffers when the 3 R's are supplanted by "web development for 8 year olds".

Now, suddenly Sept. 11th happens, and bureaucrats across the country are trying to find a million-and-one uses for a surveillance camera. As usual, a noisy bunch of yes-men is singing the praises of this new advance in running a government and everyone else is either not paying attention or just thanking their lucky stars that their kids already graduated.

"Simple. You stare in the direction of the teacher and let your mind wander. "
I think that if troubled kids tried to do that for 6 hours every day, they'd double their SATs. From what I hear from a good friend who's taught in both rough and rural CA schools, pretending to listen would be a monstrous improvement.

"A webcam running 6 hours a day isn't a few "snips". It's a waste of time."
It's the source of snips when recorded. Are you intentionally trying to be stupid?

"Because no one who is normal is going to spend six hours of their day… If you need to rely on a webcam instead, there's something wrong with you"
Never mind, got my answer… So now you feel the need to defend your previous idiocy by pretending that someone has to watch all 6 hours or nothing. You are a "waste of time".