Distance Learning and the Digital Divide

This piece was part of an ongoing collaboration with Comcast on Portland Mom Collective. Working with the team at Comcast, they are going above and beyond to provide internet services to kids and families during the coronavirus pandemic. I had the opportunity to interview their Director of Community Impact for an informal piece about the onset of distance learning and how to get access to those who need it.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.

“When I first heard that schools were transitioning to online learning due to the coronavirus, my first thought was, “But what about all the kids without home internet?” While teachers are being amazing and reassuring families that we’re all in this together, I can’t help but worry about children getting left behind.

Our partners at Comcast reached out to Portland Mom Collective because they are working hard to ensure that doesn’t happen to ANY students. In addition to making free internet available to families with the help of community partners and their Internet Essentials program, Comcast has also ramped up parental controls, opened up their public WiFi hotspots and brought a ton of educational content to their X1 and Flex services in response to the coronavirus.

To talk over how Comcast/Xfinity are helping families through this time, I spoke with Rebecca Brown, Director of Community Impact at Comcast. When we spoke, she was working from home with her three kids, like so many of us. After all, it wouldn’t have been an authentic mom-to-mom pandemic conversation if we hadn’t been interrupted at least once!”

Read the full article and interview on Portland Mom Collective
>> https://portland.momcollective.com/media-tech/distance-learning-comcast/