Friday 4 March 2022

Cool Cat Teacher BlogCool Cat Teacher Blog

Cool Cat Teacher BlogCool Cat Teacher Blog


How Much RAM Is Enough RAM in 2022?

Posted: 03 Mar 2022 05:27 PM PST

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

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So if you can afford it, 16 GB of RAM is not an unreasonable baseline for your 2022 machine. You might not take advantage of all that power right now, especially if you don't use your computer for intensive tasks. But these are expensive machines that should last us longer than the upgrade cycle of a smartphone, and an extra $200 for RAM today is much better than $1,000+ on a new laptop three years from now.

As I tell students (and parents) often… buy as much RAM as you can afford. I've never had some one ever in all my years of recommending hardware tell me they bought too much RAM.

I have, however, had many come back regretfully telling me that they should have listened as they are faced with having to buy another machine within a year or so of buying their first one.

Nowadays, I recommend 16GB of RAM and 32 GB if you can afford it and are able to get it on the machine. If a person is only using it for surfing the web, I would think 8 GB would be ok. However, I just had this conversation with a colleague and this article lines up with what I told her several weeks ago. As much as you can afford. Scrimping on RAM always gets you in the end.

This also applies to school purchases of hardware.

Source: How Much RAM is Enough RAM in 2022?

The post How Much RAM Is Enough RAM in 2022? appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

Google Meet Bandwidth detector (and how I’ve been using this on Zoom)

Posted: 03 Mar 2022 02:18 PM PST

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Google is rolling out a handy new tool for Workspace admins who use Google Meet to keep in touch with staff. Starting today, admins can see a record of participant bandwidth during meetings . So if you were hoping to fake a bad connection to get out of a meeting early, prepare to be called out.

"You Can No Longer Fake a Bad Connection to Get Out of Google Meet Calls" Android Police

The feature that lets me see the bandwidth of a student has been in Zoom for a while. It comes to Google Meet now.

I used to watch the bandwidth stats on our cyber campus and would proactively message the kids and parents for suggestions and to help them. I will say that when you know they don't have a bandwidth problem, it still becomes a “he said /she said” because so many don't understand bandwidth data.

I've seen kids dropping 10% of the conversation of a class hang on and still ace the course. I've also seen students with great connections seemingly hang up out of the blue. In the end, you have to trust parents and students. I would usually say things like, “let me look at the bandwidth data.” I would then share a layman's explanation of what I saw and ask for more information about where the student was, etc.

Sometimes a student moving closer to the router, or the router coming out of the closet and being put on a higher shelf has made a huge difference. I would say that 90% of the time the bandwidth data made a positive difference in my ability to help students. The other 10% of the time, it didn't matter what the data was, the only data that mattered was that a student wasn't in zoom and the parent wasn't able to monitor the situation. In this case, I always deferred to just giving students the benefit of the doubt and moved on. It did give me the luxury of knowing it wasn't on the end of the video conferencing tool and I could move on without worrying.

I do hope these stats will be helpful for those using Google Meet for distance learning.

Also remember, there are things we cannot know about the other side of a connection but we can use this to be helpful, not punitive. Nobody needs that.

Source: You can no longer fake a bad connection to get out of Google Meet calls

See also: Bandwidth is the Library Card of the Information Age

The post Google Meet Bandwidth detector (and how I’ve been using this on Zoom) appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

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