For a few years now, I've worked part time with special ed kids in our (largish) public system. Last year, I was supporting 3rd and 5th graders (elementary school here). This year, I'm supporting 6-8 (middle school).

Last spring, distance learning was not good. We shifted quickly (about 2 weeks to prepare), and mostly never did live ("synchronous") instruction. We did manage to get chromebooks, hotspots, and lunches to most of those who needed them. The platforms were locked down enough to keep kids out of trouble and robust enough to stay up. (There were some true horror stories last spring in other places.)

This year is very different, albeit in part going from ES to MS. We have 7 classes and a homeroom live, with A and B days of 4 one-hour classes, and Wednesday ordinarily for office hours/extra help. If we miss school on any weekday not named Wednesday (happens a lot), that week's Wednesday is repurposed as the replacement live day.

The system has handed out over 165K chromebooks at this point, including new touch screen ones to all ES kids. The system is centered around Canvas and Google stuff (except classroom which we dropped this year), with Synergy on the back end. We use a lot of Nearpod in our school but I don't know how widespread it is. Our school has rigorously standardized the look and feel of each class in Canvas, so there's not a lot of hunting around for stuff. (My son's HS hasn't standardized so much; trying to find stuff is frustrating him.) We have an online, school-appropriate library that has a kindle-like app their personal phones/tablets.

Three weeks in, it's settling into a recognizable school routine, and kids are generally engaged and behaving. (OK, they are middle-schoolers!) Other than the odd zoom or google outage (those guys are getting stress-tested!), the platforms are working pretty well. From what I can see, our biggest tech problem is poorly deployed wifi in homes.