This year has been rough on everyone. In addition to living in a pandemic world, students had to get through a year of school— online! Falcon Cove teachers and students had countless opinions on how they felt about having to suddenly change from in-person learning to Teams learning.

Teachers were taught how to use the video and audio meeting system, Microsoft Teams, from the very beginning of the pandemic. Broward County Schools chose to use Microsoft Teams over other popular applications, like Google Meets or Zoom. Yet, it has seemed to have worked just fine. 

“In order to adapt to teaching fully online, I attended several trainings to learn how to effectively use Teams way back in March 2020,” states 8th grade language arts teacher, Mrs. Gina Powers.“I’m fine with Teams. I know some people prefer Zoom, but Teams did some updates which made it comparable to Zoom, and since I didn’t really use Zoom that much, it was easy to adjust to Teams.”

Microsoft Teams is one thing students have mixed feelings about- some concerns about the software include that it’s slow, harder to use, and doesn’t have the same capabilities as other online meeting platforms. Other students found it just fine and were very content with its abilities. 

Falcon Cove student Ally Wang says “I found Teams to be rather hard to use… I don’t know any platform that would be better than Discord,” says 8th grader Ally Wang. “Teams just doesn’t match up.” On the other hand, Matias Florez Saavedra states, “Teams was very easy to manage and use compared to other meeting platforms.”

In addition to this, the adjustment to online learning was easy for some students, but pretty difficult for others. The perks of learning at home include not having to make the daily commute, snacking all day long, and more freedom to learn at your own pace, but many students miss their friends and can’t learn as well when facing a screen.

“It wasn’t hard to adjust to online learning, we had about the same schedule… all in all, it wasn’t too difficult” says Ally. Matias reports “It was very different at times, I had to adjust in many ways during the school year. Specifically getting used to online learning and managing time.”

Through this rough year, students have managed to work online and adapt to Teams lessons. However, Broward County Public Schools has announced that the 2021-2022 school year will be in-person fully for all students. Although some are nervous, Falcons are excited to make the transition back into school full time. 

“I’m pretty excited! I’ve already started going to school in-person, so being in a face-to-face school next year means I’ll finally get to talk to a full class!” says Ally Wang. 8th grader Nathaly Baumgartner says, “I am excited to go in person next year, but also nervous because I haven’t been with so many people in a while.”