Whenever senior Stormm Scott talks to teachers and classmates, she’s at risk of “sounding like Wall-e from the Disney movie.” Scott can only go ten minutes into a meeting before getting kicked out, causing her to continually leave and rejoin her classes. Many other students are facing similar technology jams that can disturb their learning environments. 

To properly concentrate and participate in class, students have to juggle many tabs (Schoology, Mathalicious, Google Classroom, Desmos, etc.) while still showing their faces and chiming in during Zoom calls for participation points. For junior Alec Swenor, it is difficult to follow along with his teachers’ lessons without his computer glitching or Zoom malfunctioning, causing him to miss class.

“Since my internet connection is often pretty weak, opening a new tab during a Zoom call is always a gamble. I’m not sure if it will mess up my meeting quality or not,” Swenor said. “It’s most annoying when I’m just trying to go along with the teacher’s lesson by following along on a specific document or something and all of a sudden everyone’s audio lags on my end.” 

The lag ranges from a slight delay to “robot noises.” 

“It’s not as annoying as long as I don’t have any extra tabs open,” Swenor added.

For Scott, constant issues make the entire situation irritating.

“It’s annoying the whole time,” she said. 

Neither Scott or Swenor have a real solution to their problems, and they only have a vague idea of why their school-issued Chromebooks are misbehaving in the way they are. 

“I think it’s because the class sizes are so great in number that the software and computers can’t handle it,” Scott guessed. “My computer fries almost every day on those Zooms.” 

Swenor concluded that it was probably a bandwidth issue based on his classmates’ comments after he apologized for his poor audio. 

Scott plans to live with the situation until in-person schooling starts again, while Swenor has “high hopes” for fixing the glitches.  

“I’ve been trying to get my parents to figure out our WiFi situation for a long, long time,” he said. “I think this is what’s finally gonna change it though, since it’s directly interfering with my education.”