AD ALTA
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
4 Teachers and taught topics
According to Murray (2013), in the USA already in 2013 almost
three quarters of teachers preferred using modern technological
aids (Murray, 2013) and the situation concerning teachers´
interest in developing their tech knowledge was even then also
very high. The situation in Slovakia is similar in that. Back in
2018 according to a survey conducted by the National Institute
for Certified Educational Measurements (NÚCEM) within the
project Programme for the International Assessment of Adult
Key Competencies (PIAAC) more than half of all the teachers
participating in the monitoring felt a dire need and desire to be
further educated in the area of teaching using IT tools. Although
the target group of the monitoring were “adults”, a part of the
project was also an assessment of teachers` key competences
related to reading and math literacy and problem solving with
the use of information and communication technologies. The
main goal of this part of the project was to evaluate the use of
information and communication technologies by teachers both at
school (in their teaching practice) as well as at home (Wirtz,
Zelmanová, Galleé, 2018).
The lockdown caught Slovakia and many schools and teachers
red-handed in their low preparedness to handle online teaching.
The problem has been rooted in the low level of digitalized
education in Slovakia, the concept for which was approved in
2014 with its planning process supposedly culminating in 2020
(Conception of informatization and digitalization of the sector of
education with a view to 2020; MŠVVaŠ, 2014), but which
never actually got transformed into action plans according to the
Supreme Audit Office of the Slovak Republic. Even the Ministry
of Education, Science, Research and Sport (MŠVVaŠ) issued its
first guidelines as to how to conduct teaching in lockdown only
43 days after the state of emergency was declared (Guidelines to
the content and organization of teaching primary school pupils
during the emergency breakdown of school education at schools
in the academic year 2019/2020, MŠVVaŠ, 2020).
All the mentioned is supported by the European Commission´s
Education and Training Monitor 2019 paper, in which the
National Programme for the Development of Education (NPDE)
stressed the necessity to extend ICT use in all classroom settings
and highlighted that the ratio of teachers aged under 30 reaches a
maximum of 9% in secondary schools and 7% in elementary
school (Course Management Systems). This information is
important as only the young generation of teachers is likely to
use ICT tools at home and therefore, will use them in their jobs
and the classroom, too (EC, 2019).
Concerning the average age of the analyzed school teaching
staff, it is 35. At least half of all staff members had experienced
some form of online education before March 2020 either due to
the fact that they had continued teaching from their home
countries (e.g. Ukraine, Spain) during their summer holidays or
because the language school had some students sign up from
outside the premises (central Slovakia, Hungary, Austria). For
all these reasons almost all staff members had active skype
accounts set up and did not experience hurdles connecting to the
internet or communicating through the screen.
Besides the teachers and technology means they have at disposal
another aspect influencing efficiency of distance education is
content of this education, suitability of topics which are going to
be taught in this way. The basic precondition for effective
distance education to take place is a carefully selected area of
topics suitable to be taught online, as well as their special
didactic processing in electronic form (Mišút, 2013). Based on
the findings of the Supreme Audit Office of the Slovak Republic
it may be stated that the accessible online curriculum does not
suit all schools in the same way and during the lockdown it was
up to the creativity of teachers what content from other sources
they could provide for their students. The Office states that the
digitization of the educational processes and access to digital
educational content is stagnating in Slovakia, a good example of
which is the Digiškola portal, whose content has not been
updated since the beginning of 2016 (Najvyšší kontrolný úrad
SR, 2017).
Regarding the content of teaching in the courses provided by
discussed school, a huge advantage of learning in it is that the
subject matter is adjusted to the individual learner´s or the
relatively homogenous group´s needs and, therefore, given that
the materials to teach from are well-chosen at the beginning of
the course there is no difference in teaching the same content
face-to-face or online. Actually, there is more up-to-date content
available online than in a book and given a strong internet
connection, a creative teacher and a responsive student, a book-
based course can be significantly livened up through state-of-
the-art online tools, which can take the topic of the book further
or make it more colourful and memorable, as a result.
5 Feasibility of online exercises
In the majority of cases the lessons continued to be based on
books open on the desk, both parties facing each other on the
screen and to a certain extent, this method worked, making
online lessons very much conversational. However, there were
many exercises which were almost inexecutable online. These
had to be dropped, due to either the nature of the exercise itself
or the limitations of the features of the application used for e-
learning. These hindrances could not be solved to the satisfaction
of all parties oftentimes due to the unwillingness of the students
or their parents to adjust to the prevailing limitations, which
resulted in student number decline (student numbers declined
due to financial implications as well, which was a typical case
for company lessons; less than 5 % of the lessons lost in the case
of natural entities was due to lack of finances or future job loss
fears).
5.1 Exercises almost inexecutable online
Online almost inexecutable exercises have been mainly the ones
presented hereinafter.
Total Physical Response (TPR) Activities
Kids are hard to control even when they are in the real
classroom. Simultaneously, they respond very well to each
other´s presence in games, which enables for group learning to
take place. Total Physical Response games take place in groups
and kids often do not understand all the words or sentences the
teacher uses but they mime the teacher and each other, too,
which is a prerequisite for total physical response. Since there
were no classmates nearby, these exercises could not take place.
Backup solution
In case that the parents of kindergarten-age kids had agreed for
their kids to have individual online classes in the length of 20
minutes, total physical response activities worked to a certain
extent if the kid was willing to mime the teacher doing the same
physical activity in the room.
Listening activities
The most straightforward and user-friendly application the
teachers had had previous experience with was skype. For this
reason, the school suggested on the eve of the lockdown that
every student and teacher download this application or refresh it,
so that after the exchange of telephone numbers and the
rescheduling of the timetable everyone would be able to
seamlessly continue their language studies. The teachers,
however, did not foresee a hindrance, which lies in the current
form of skype being unable to play a listening activity real time.
Backup solution
The way how listening activities were substituted in real time
was by sending the recording to the students in files on skype,
which the student then downloaded to his/her computer and did
the listening activities on his/her own unaided by the teacher.
This process depended on, however the teacher having the
teacher´s CD, uploading all the files into her/his computer (if
s/he happened to have a CD-player embedded computer) and
having the time to send all the files to the student’s skype
- 108 -