Tech Tools to Aid Teaching In a Classroom This Pandemic. Tech tools have really proved useful in aiding teaching in classrooms during this pandemic. It is estimated around half the world’s students’ schools remain shut down. All told, this has been a possibility and negative disruption to the education of a generation.
But one of the few positive outcomes from this experience is an opportunity to rethink how digital technologies can be used to support teaching and learning in schools.
But one of the few positive outcomes from this experience is an opportunity to rethink how digital technologies can be used to support teaching and learning in schools.
Tech Tools to Aid Teaching In a Classroom This Pandemic
This is not to echo the hype (currently being pushed by many education reformers and IT industry actors) that COVID will prove a tipping-point after which schools will be pushed fully into digital education.
Instead, the most compelling technology-related lessons to take from the pandemic involve the informal, improvised, scrappy digital practices that have helped teachers, students, and parents get through school at home.
Technology During the Pandemic
All over the world, school shutdowns have seen teachers, students, and families get together to achieve great things with relatively simple technologies. This includes the surprising rise of TikTok as a source of informal learning content.
Previously the domain of young content creators, remote schooling saw teachers of all ages turn to the video platform to share bite-size (up to one minute) chunks of teaching, give inspirational feedback, set learning challenges, or simply show students and parents how they were coping.
Tiktok Education
TikTok has also been used as a place for educational organizations, public figures, and celebrity scientists to produce bespoke learning content, as well as allowing teachers to put together materials for a wider audience.
Even principals have used it to keep in contact with their school making 60-second video addresses, motivational speeches, and other alternatives to the traditional school assembly speech.
Classes in WhatsApp
Classes in some countries have been run through WhatsApp, primarily because this was one platform most students and families had access to, and were used to using in their everyday lives.
Virtual Bitmoji Classrooms
Elsewhere, teachers have set up virtual Bitmoji classrooms featuring colorful backdrops and cartoon avatars of themselves.
These spaces act as a friendly online version of their familiar classroom space for students to check-in and find out what they should be learning, access resources, and temporarily feel they were back at school.
Some teachers have worked out creative ways of Zoom-based teaching. These stretch beyond the streamed lecture format and include live demonstrations, experiments, and live music and pottery workshops.
Mobile Phones in School Beneficial or Risky
Official forms of school technology are increasingly criticized for being boring, overly-standardized, and largely serving institutional imperatives, rather than pitched toward the interests of students and teachers.
Concerns are growing over the limited educational benefits of personalized learning systems, as well as the data and privacy implications of school platforms and systems such as Google Classroom.
The pandemic period has seen many schools forced to make the best of whatever technologies were immediately to hand. Previously reticent teachers now have first-hand experience of making use of unfamiliar technologies.
Many parents are now on board with the educational potential of social media and games. Most importantly, students have been given a taste of what they can achieve with “their” own technology. You can get more details here.
