AD ALTA
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
As the Teach for Slovakia programme highlights, 10 % of all
elementary school children live in poverty and, in all likelihood,
do not possess a smartphone, computer or do not have internet
connection (Teachforslovakia, 2020a). According to the Institute
of Educational Policy this means that more than 32000
elementary school kids in Slovakia have no internet connection.
Therefore, these kids may learn 90 % less than their counterparts
living in average living standards, who learn only 30 % less
when education takes place online and not in the classroom
(Teachforslovakia, 2020b). Another research, conducted in June
2019 aimed at finding out what purposes students use the
internet for, did not reveal such an alarming number of students
lacking the necessary hardware and internet connection for
distance learning but, on the other hand, claimed that almost
every child in Slovakia owns a mobile phone with internet
access (Janková, 2019). The study claimed to be representative
of the whole country, however, the reality less than a year later
proved this representative study otherwise.
Cutting edge technology with innovative educational tools like
the Glogster App have proved to have a motivating effect for
learners enhancing their communication skills, mainly English as
foreign language learners (Martinez-Alba, Cruzado-Guerrero,
Pitcher, 2014), and higher order thinking skills (Nazirah, Azira,
Aziz, Woods, 2009; Khonamri, Azizi, Králik, 2020), too.
Microsoft has started to conduct its own research and via the use
of Office 365 and Microsoft Teams in real classrooms has
proved that the “inside-out” teaching method can be applied with
tangible results (Vámos, 2019). They have also proved that the
Microsoft Innovative School programme has all that it takes to
digitally transfer a school from bottom-up in one school year
(Korompay, 2019).
Even though all the families of the students of the concerned
school possessed some kind of digital devices (less the
exceptions), due to the high frequency of their use for work and
study purposes they were not always available for language
learning purposes. If it was the parents who were the learners
(i.e. students of the private language school), it was sometimes
they who had to give up their digital appliance in favour of the
needs of their offspring all of which had a negative effect on
student numbers and hours taught per week. All of this goes to
show that it is not only the finances, but also intensity of the use
of tech devices that have an effect on the feasibility of teaching
during pandemics.
3 Transformation from offline to online education institution
A very important fact, which has to be mentioned and
understood, is that the school which is presented did not adopt
Course Management System (CMS) or Learning Management
System (LMS) to provide an online environment for course
interactions.
CMS typically includes a variety of online tools and
environments, such as: an area for faculty posting of class
materials such as course syllabus and handouts, an area for
student posting of papers and other assignment, a gradebook
where faculty can record grades and each student can view his or
her grades, an integrated email tool allowing participants to send
announcement email messages to the entire class or to a subset
of the entire class, a chat tool allowing synchronous
communication among class participants or a threaded
discussion board allowing asynchronous communication among
participants. The reason was that the class materials had already
been more or less already adapted to online teaching by the
publishing houses, the students managed their homework
individually with their teachers online as most of the group
courses was broken down to shorter individual classes, teachers
do not use gradebooks, there was no need for the teachers to
send announcements for their own groups that would not have
been sent by the central office to every student and chat tools or
threaded discussion boards were embedded in more user-friendly
internet communicators.
LMS enables a school not just to manage but also deliver e-
learning courses, which is a feature that would have made it
useful for the school to adopt it for its distant teaching purposes.
However, an LMS needs scrupulous attention from a central
office which inducts the teachers about all its features prior its
use. In addition, an LMS needs constant management throughout
its use and a back-up office offering constant support while its
use to integrated users, that is teachers and students alike. And
since the school central office had to close down, there was no
space whatsoever to set up and keep up such a means of teaching
for the entire period of lockdown.
For all the above reasons the school declined the option of
integrating a CMS or LMS into its teaching processes and from
the available collaboration tools went with internet
communicators as a means of delivering education during
lockdown. The tools the teacher used the most often were skype
and zoom mainly because they were required to be installed on
the sides of the students by their respective schools and it is a
precondition to have some kind identical tool to be installed on
both sides for education to take place. Other tools students had
been required to install in elementary and secondary schools
were messenger and viber, and since they take up less working
memory in a device than skype or zoom some students preferred
to go by them. For this reason, messenger often worked as a
back-up solution if there was no computer at hand or the internet
connection was too weak to handle high-peak information flow
on skype or zoom. In addition, many students, especially adults
possess a facebook account, and in such a case messenger calls
are automatically enabled. These students preferred using
messenger as an educational tool in addition to those situations.
Each from the used online tools enabled and disabled certain
types of exercises which otherwise may or may not have been
possible to do face-to-face. The key to success was to quickly
realize how to continue teaching all the courses using the
materials at hand. It became evident that no ad hoc teaching
would be possible and due to the closure of the school no
copying or scanning could be realized. Even the basic contact
between teacher and student was impaired. Only those students
could continue learning who had some type of interface and a
stable internet connection available at the new schedule times,
which were negotiated between the teachers and the students
themselves. Connectivity did not depend particularly on the
financial background of the parents but more on the fact whether
there were enough interfaces at a particular time available for all
the family members needing them. Logging times were lengthy
at times and that had limiting effects on the lessons, making,
them impossible to happen at certain times of the day.
Due to the limitations on the part of the students regarding the
former conditions and the family limitations on the side of the
teachers, the original schedule had to change dramatically and
continued to be negotiated all the way until the end of the school
year. Considering that not every teacher knew how to teach
groups online and the fact that there were time limitations on the
part of the students, most groups had to be broken apart and the
available time was divided equally between the remaining group
members, which was doable thanks to the small sizes of the
groups. Timing was key for the school as many schools in the
region were unable to provide any education for their students at
all or provided them only in limited numbers as suggested by the
Ministry of Education.
Language lessons had a tendency to be left behind in all the
schools; therefore, the language school considered as its “duty”
to continue providing language education and uphold a normal
student-teacher relationship as part of healthy psycho-hygiene,
too, when many people did not talk to almost anybody at all. The
courses had to continue also due to the fact that some students
were facing their final leaving exams in May or Cambridge
language exams in June (Lalinská, Stranovská, Gadušová, 2020).
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