Inauguration in my school
We have a small school. An advantage is flexibility. We shortened periods yesterday so that we ran 1-2-3-4-5-inauguration-6-7. After 5 students reported to pre-assigned rooms. Call it around 11:40.
We’d been working on live feed into each classroom. And I’d been predicting that we would end up listening. We were set with the radio over the PA (we never intended to pull audio off the live feed).
One of the rooms never went up. Around 11:30 – 11:45 another room went down, and then another. We shifted kids into rooms with video. We lost more rooms, and more shifting. Just before noon we lost more. We were down to half our rooms. But the kids packed in. And then we watched.
With the words “congratulations Mr. President” there came applause over the PA. But it was drowned out by the applause in the room. Then the speech started. Some kids slept. Most listened. A few fidgeted. Some listened intently.
I have heard Obama give inspirational speeches. Yesterday’s was not one of them. But then again, it’s just a speech.
JD2718 
Someone in each building was supposed to have a meeting with a tech to assess the situation but my information was every school was to limit their live internet feeds to a maximum of 2. Since I have a very low opinion of the DOE on such matters I assumed 2 wouldn’t work and that 1 was iffy and went out of my way to get this set up with cable in the auditorium even though it meant half our students would have to see the taped version. In the end my way worked uneventfully. The internet in the building pretty much went down as predicted. The live feed attempt failed (I wanted to at least try so I’d have some info for future attempts) and once again the DOE let us down. As to the speech, it was ok, not great, not bad. But the kids did pay attention by and large.
I think it was a good idea to try but it just goes to show how much work needs to be done on the technology end with the NYCDOE’s networking backbone. It’s hugely improved from a few years back but hardly adequate for the growing demands being placed on it.
We have TVs in our rooms (from Channel One) as well as cable, so we got around the Internet problem. We also had our theater set up for teachers who wanted to take students to see the inauguration on a large screen.