A Short History on K12
Sam Billot, Senior, iPreparatory Academy
Sam Billot, Senior, iPreparatory Academy
Image from Miami Herald
Well, this year went off with a bang; that bang happened when the K12 servers crashed on the second day of classes. Regardless, if you weren't aware, all teachers and students were attempting to use a program called K12, a company that reports as “The nation’s leading provider of online curriculum and support services for grades K-12.” The district officials wanted a program that would be a singular source for teaching and learning online. Although, that didn't seem to last long.
At first, some students couldn't log in and certain assignments weren’t loading. People just shrugged it off as simple technical issues like server overload or the newness of the program. The next few days, however, absolutely nothing was working, and teachers scrambled to move things along to Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
According to the Miami Herald, a 16 year old student from South Miami Senior High caused a deliberate attack on the My School Online program using a free program that can launch a distributed denial of service attack, or a DDoS attack, which is basically sending a ton of computers to one server and overloading it. Additionally the same source reports that the program was quite simple to use and wasn’t extremely potent, which brought into question the security of the K12 program.
Image from Zoom Blog
At the time of writing this, the senior high schoolers are using Teams and Zoom to learn, and teachers tend to use whatever they used to use for assignments, such as Edmodo, Khan Academy, and Google Classroom. The elementary schoolers are using Microsoft Teams for announcements, and programs like Discovery Ed, Ebooks, Common Lit, NewsELA, and Kahoot as other resources to keep up with their schoolwork.
At the time of writing this, the senior high schoolers are using Teams and Zoom to learn, and teachers tend to use whatever they used to use for assignments, such as Edmodo, Khan Academy, and Google Classroom. The elementary schoolers are using Microsoft Teams for announcements, and programs like Discovery Ed, Ebooks, Common Lit, NewsELA, and Kahoot as other resources to keep up with their schoolwork.
At the end of the day, this wasn't a massive issue for the district, but it definitely made the first week of classes interesting.