Ninety days — an account of the lockdown at IFMT
It has been ninety days since the Bela Vista campus of IFMT closed.
On Friday, March 13, 2020, there were still people in the hallways, students in the cafeteria, the usual buzz of a federal institute in full operation. On Monday, the campus was empty. The guidelines mentioned two weeks of recess. Then it became a month. Then they stopped giving deadlines.
Ninety days later, I am here writing this account. And the campus is still empty.
The shock
The first reaction was paralysis. The campus is not just classrooms — it is labs, it is hands-on practice, it is the teacher walking between desks, the student who learns by doing, the conversation in the hallway after class. None of that fits in a Meet room.
But education could not stop. And technology was the only bridge.
I am a civil servant in information technology, not a teacher. But when the whole world migrated to the internet in a single week, everyone became IT — and IT became everything.
Why Meet and YouTube
The first question was not “what is the best teaching platform”. It was: what do our students have at home?
The answer was simple and defined everything: a phone. Almost every student had one. Not all had a computer, not all had good internet — but practically all of them had a phone in hand.
That ruled out several options. We could not require students to install a dedicated remote-teaching app, depend on a dedicated server we would have to maintain, or need a computer with a minimum spec. We are a public institution, with a public budget, in the middle of a pandemic — there was no time or resources to build infrastructure from scratch.
Meet and YouTube solved everything at once.
Meet runs in the phone’s browser, needs no dedicated app, and the link is just a click. YouTube is practically universal — any phone can access it, on any connection, at any quality. A student on a flaky 3G connection can watch a recorded class in low resolution; on a live one-hour video call, that same connection would drop every five minutes.
And Google Workspace for Education was already configured. Institutional accounts for everyone, teachers and students. It was not a new solution to learn — it was a solution that already existed and just needed to be used.
The choice was not about the most advanced technology. It was about the most inclusive one. Meeting the student where they already were: phone in hand, inside the Google ecosystem, with nothing to install and no server of ours to depend on.
Teaching teachers on Meet
The first mission came fast and without a manual: get the teachers onto Google Meet.
Workspace for Education was already configured, with institutional accounts for everyone. The problem was that almost nobody knew they had an account, and even fewer knew what to do with it.
And that is how I ended up teaching — the teachers.
The irony did not go unnoticed: teaching how to use Meet, through Meet. Me at my house, them at theirs, each with a different level of familiarity with technology, sharing screens, showing where to click, explaining for the third time how to mute the microphone.
I set up a class scheme. I grouped teachers by difficulty level — those who already had some familiarity went together and moved faster; those who had never been in a video call went in another class, at whatever pace they needed. Instead of a generic tutorial, I adapted the training for each group. For calculus and math teachers, I showed how to combine Meet with a digital whiteboard. For lab teachers, we discussed replacing hands-on practice with simulations and recorded demonstrations.
Some days the class was about Meet. Some days it was about fear. A teacher who has been teaching on a blackboard for thirty years, suddenly frozen in front of the camera, not knowing where to put their hands. The technology was the pretext, but what I was really doing was building confidence. Showing that it worked, that they would not break anything, that the right button was right there.
I saw a colleague get emotional at the end of their first online class — not for the class itself, but for having pulled it off. I saw a calculus teacher almost give up trying to write an integral with a mouse. I saw people who had never heard of screen sharing become the reference for their colleagues two weeks later.
Support had no schedule. It started at seven in the morning with a WhatsApp message and ended at ten at night with the last question resolved. Weekends became workdays from so many teachers needing help to record Monday’s class.
YouTube and graphics tablets
Live classes solve half the problem. The other half is the student who could not watch it live, who has limited internet, who needs to review. Each course needed a YouTube channel, with playlists organized by subject and by term.
Creating the channel was easy. Teaching how to maintain it — record, edit, publish, organize — was another story. And there were teachers who needed to write on the screen.
For math, physics, chemistry, technical drawing, trying to write with a mouse is like trying to paint with a brick. The solution was graphics tablets. I looked up affordable models, configured the ones that arrived, tested compatibility with whiteboard software and with Meet itself. Some teachers bought their own; others, the institution managed to provide. Every tablet that arrived and started working was one more subject that could be taught remotely without turning into illegible letters on screen.
I also taught, via Meet, how to use the graphics tablet together with screen sharing. How to draw, how to switch between the script and the board, how to record the explanation and upload it to YouTube. Again: the tool was technical, but the work was patience.
Automation
It was in Google Classroom that the whole thing turned into code.
The campus has dozens of courses, hundreds of subjects, thousands of students. Each subject needs a class in Classroom. Each class needs a teacher, enrolled students, a Meet link, organization. Doing this manually, one by one, would be weeks of repetitive work — and probably be wrong in the first week.
That is when the programmer instinct spoke louder. Instead of clicking buttons, I wrote scripts.
Google Classroom has a complete API. With a few calls, I cross-referenced the student database with the class schedule, created classes in batch, enrolled students automatically, invited teachers, and set up the Meet link in each room. What would have taken weeks of manual work came out in an afternoon of code.
It was nothing elegant. Emergency scripts never are. But they worked — and when the database changed the following week, all it took was running them again.
Ninety days later
Today, ninety days after the lockdown, the worst of the chaos has passed. Teachers are on Meet. The YouTube channels exist. The graphics tablets arrived — most of them. The Classroom scripts run. Emergency remote teaching has become routine.
But routine does not mean solved.
The YouTube channels need organization — you cannot find a second-term physics class in the middle of three hundred unordered videos. The Classroom scripts work, but they are fragile: no error handling, no validation, no logs. If I get sick, nobody knows where the thing stops. And there are still teachers who resist, who still freeze when it is time to share the screen, who still send a message at nine at night asking for help.
Coordination is the biggest challenge, and it is not a technical task — it is a human one. It is dozens of teachers with completely different levels of familiarity with technology, each with their own way of teaching, their insecurities, their fears. Some learned everything in a week and are producing better content than they did in person. Others still freeze. My job is to make sure no one is left behind.
Not knowing until when
What makes everything harder is that there is no end date.
If someone said “hold on until August”, we would hold on through anything. But no one says it. The news gets worse, the numbers go up, the decisions are postponed. We plan month by month, week by week, sometimes day by day.
Ninety days have already passed. I do not know how many are ahead. I know that tomorrow there are more classes — and that someone has to make sure they happen.