Online Class | Home Setup

Today my kid had his first online class session, the program will run for a month so that all parties (school, teachers, students and parents) will have a chance to explore this option and make adjustments as needed. This will also serve as a preparation for the planned online regular classes in August if things fall to the right places.

So what kind of home setup is needed? Some use mobile devices like mobile phones or tablet. Some use a PC or laptop. All of them works with both PROs’s and CON’s.

For our own home setup we are still making adjustments, but the basics we have are as follows:

OUR HOME SETUP:

1. Laptop

We have an old Lenovo W540 with 4GB RAM and have upgraded the hard drive to SSD. It runs on Windows 10 with just the basic programs like MS Office, Adobe Reader, etc. It is hard wired to the router and automatically switches over to Wi-Fi when LAN fails.

2. Docking station

We’re using an old Lenovo docking station (also called port replicator) to easily add up to 2 external screens via the display ports. The dock also gives extra USB ports and it allows the laptop to charge its battery when docked.

3. External monitor

The extra monitor is not necessary but rather nice to have to separate the program windows so they don’t overlap at one another. For example, on the laptop’s screen the Zoom program is where it’s at, while the Google Classroom window is on the external monitor. It’s more convenient this way.

4. Mouse

We have an old Lenovo wired mouse. It still works fine after so many users and I don’t see any reason to upgrade to wireless.

5. Speaker (bluetooth)

At first everything works fine, except that the bluetooth speaker keeps turning off by itself every 5 minutes. So we instead used the laptop’s built-in speaker but the volume is not good even when fully turned up. We are planning to add a USB speaker to address this issue.

6. Headset

We’re using an old Plantronics headset with microphone. It works as it should and is perfectly fine. We will soon add a separate condenser microphone and we will keep the Plantronics headset as a back up.

7. DSL

We’re using Globe DSL for a few years now and thankfully there aren’t any big and frequent issues.

Our setup pretty much covers the basics and it is not perfect. The important thing is it works. As long as your setup works you are good. Hope we can have a back up internet line soon but for now we can use LTE data as failover in case our main connection fails.