Page 106

AD ALTA

JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH

APPLICATION OF ONLINE TEACHING TOOLS AND AIDS DURING CORONA PANDEMICS 2020

ALENA HAŠKOVÁ,

CSILLA ŠAFRANKO,

MARTINA PAVLÍKOVÁ,

LUCIA PETRIKOVIČOVÁ

Faculty of Education, Constantine the Philosopher University

Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher University

Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Tr. A. Hlinku 1,
949 74 Nitra, Slovakia

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Constantine the Philosopher

University

Email:

ahaskova@ukf.sk,

csilla.safranko@ukf.sk

mpavlikova@ukf.sk,

lpetrikovicova@ukf.sk

Abstract: The corona pandemics forced the schools worldwide to move to distance
forms of education. On an example of a particular school, namely a private language
school seated in Nitra region (SK), the authors describe technical conditions of the
transformation from offline education to online education and deal with feasibility of
different kinds of exercises, used in foreign language teaching, in online education.
The feasibility study is complemented by methodological comments derived from the
experiences which the teachers of the school obtained while teaching under the
pandemic conditions.

Keywords: distance education, online teaching, online teaching tools, online exercises,
primary and secondary schools, foreign language teaching, coronavirus pandemics,
teacher experiences

1 Introduction

Spring 2020 saw many of our lives change like never before.
Coronavirus pandemics was not the end of the world, but rather
the end of the way we understood our existence in the current
setup of the world, the way we live, work and study and how all
this affects our surroundings.

In the aftermath of the declaration of the state of emergency (in
the Slovak Republic, March 16, 2020) teachers faced the
inability to conduct face-to-face teaching, i.e. faced the inability
to conduct teaching in the way they had been used to. In this
situation modern teaching tools proved to be just the right ones
to support teachers and enable them to manage the situation
which had arisen. The stated is documented hereinafter through
an analysis and discussion of the way in which the modern
teaching tools were used in a private language school, seated in
Nitra region, to ensure continuous provision of teaching to its
students. A focus is given also to exercises that have proven to
be efficient in the context of the new way of teaching.

2 Conditions for remote teaching

Language labs, computer rooms, multimedia labs and interactive
whiteboards had long been known by foreign language teachers
in Slovakia before remote teaching would have ever taken place.
In fact, schools in densely populated areas with fierce
competition on the market for 1

There had long been discussions about the vanity of social
networking sites, the negative effects of online communication
tools to the detriment of physical contact and there were hard-
core supporters of the uniqueness and inevitability of face-to-
face communication and teaching, as well. All this had
dramatically been put to a halt in Slovakia as of March 16 and in
a month or so in the rest of the world when the one and only
means of being able to stay in touch with relatives and friends
and provide education for children became to be online. We
quickly had to learn and adopt the use of the following
expressions: e-learning, remote teaching, distance education or
computerized electronic education, which are, in fact, identical
expressions referring to learning utilizing electronic technologies

to access educational curriculum outside of a traditional
classroom. In most cases, it refers to a course, program or degree
delivered completely online.

graders had already started

their race to be more high-tech than their competitors a couple of
years ago, which is one of the attracting factors for young
teachers to take up teaching, on the long run. However, the
teachers were not allowed in their schools and without the
equipment ready to be used and considered vital for the online
teaching of class-size groups it proved impossible for them teach
many subjects not just in an interactive but in any way possible.

By a remote teaching tool, we mean a tool belonging to the
WEB 2.0 teaching tools, which is a group of Internet
applications allowing sharing and collaboration opportunities to
people and which helps them to express themselves online.
Without the advent of WEB 2.0, teaching would have never been
possible online as WEB 1.0 was like a shop-window, only
showing information to the readers. WEB 2.0 enables for
interaction and collaboration to take place within this shop-
window, the world wide web. It enables for information to be
altered, enlarged, manipulated with and therefore, the original
shop-window stops being so and becomes an active meeting
place for all parties, instead. And since the classroom is an active
meeting place, in an ideal setting, it can only be replaced in the
virtual world by a place which bears the same attributes as the
original classroom: the virtual classroom has to enable
cooperation, communication and active participation to reach
learning goals (Azizi, Pavlíková, Masalimova, 2020; Khonamri,
Pavlíková, Ansari, Sokolova, Korzhuev, Rudakova, 2020).

In the concerned private language school there are a lot fewer
state-of-the-art devices as in state schools, as private language
schools never have been eligible for state or EU funding from
sources, such as INFOVEK or the Electronification of the
educational system of regional schools which were projects
through which 97 % of state schools countrywide received
digital classrooms with IWBs, tablets, notebooks and printers.

Teachers at the concerned language school only had their
personal laptops at hand with IWB materials being used on these
laptops before lockdown hit, which is the reason why many of
students declined online lessons due to the fact that they had
been very much used to paperback supported teaching. On the
other hand, online teaching aids, such as youtube videos, wikis
and pronunciation applications had been incorporated into the
lessons, which is why not all students had turned down distance
teaching. Nevertheless, the lack of possessing high-end
computer labs did not prove to be a disadvantage when
lockdown hit, since reaction time of the school to the
introduction of remote teaching was literally one day. As
EdTech webeditor points out, one only need to adjust his/her
home a little bit, test his/her equipment, set up a new routine and
open up yet unused or underused communication channels with
all participants in the education process (messages, LMS, phone
calls) to make it all work (Castello, 2020). And in a small team,
like the school teams were, this was communicated and arranged
during the weekend preceding total lockdown, which, looking
back, was in fact a huge success of the school. As it is known,
readiness to apply online teaching in practice depends more on
the human factor than on technological advances (especially if
there is no one who would use them).

The ability to teach using modern teaching methods, immersive
education, experimental teaching, the flipped classroom, project-
based teaching, cooperative learning, gamification, problem-
based learning, design thinking, thinking-based learning or
competency-based learning all of a sudden depended on every
member of the teaching process possessing the hardware and
software toppled with high-speed connectivity in order to
provide the vital framework for any lesson taking place. The
importance of using online teaching aids as the only means to
conduct lessons has upgraded to unseen heights provided that
both parties (the teacher and the students) possessed the devices
on which these aids would run. By modern teaching devices we
hereby mean the physical hands-on devices we must possess
(and not the online aids in the form of apps, such as Classcraft,
Canvas or Seesaw) in order to be able to transmit and receive
information, i.e. a desk-top computer, a laptop, a tablet or a
touch screen mobile (Redaccion Realinfluencers, 2020).

- 106 -