Every year, kids all around the world go to school to learn new skills.This year, COVID-19 has spread throughout the world causing schools to resort to virtual learning. Freshmen Abel Rodrigeuz, Emanuel Floros-Lobo, and Alejandro Berrios have experienced many distractions during virtual learning, one of them being their siblings.

“With siblings, everything can get ruined, [including] your internet, your sound and your computer setup. Overall, virtual learning with more siblings will downgrade the quality.” Rodriquez said. 

Since students are learning at home they have to share an internet connection with their parents, siblings and other residents of their households.

“I think the biggest problem would be the internet issues and being able to hear the class,” Berrios said.

 Google Meet provides a chat box system for students to communicate minimizing the amount of extra noise in a call. 

“Sometimes when me and my sister are doing Meets, we can’t get in because we’re both using the internet, and today, my other sister was home, so it was even harder to get in Meets,” Flores-Lobo said.

Students with siblings that are also in school have to adjust to learning in close proximity with them.

“Little siblings can be noisy sometimes, and their call interferes with your call, especially when the teacher is very loud,” Flores-Lobo said. 

Students partaking in virtual learning use a program called Canvas to receive and complete their assignments. 

“Canvas is slow, inept, badly designed, graphically unappealing, audiotirally unappealing and just unappealing in every way in my opinion,” Rodriguez said. 

Canvas was developed in 2011 as a virtual learning tool and is now used almost universally across all college campuses. 

“Literally the other day I looked at my grade and said to myself, ‘Wait why is it low?’ and I  checked [Canvas]. Apparently, something I had done the week before had not been submitted properly by Canvas. Luckily, the teacher didn’t take any points off, but it could have been a real problem,” Berrios said. 

Despite Berrios’ few issues, he hasn’t had and major issues with Canvas overall.

“Canvas has been working well for me actually. It’s simple and easy to understand. I’ve only had one problem with it where I couldn’t submit an assignment which was like at the first week of school. I got a zero on that assignment,” Berrios said.