Digital Benefits that Lockdown Brings into the Education Environment

It has marked almost a year since the beginning of the first quarantine wave

It has marked almost a year since the beginning of the first quarantine wave and humans’ minds have shifted from “everything is bad” mood to “ok, we can handle that”. So many questions have already been discussed by experts and ordinary people regarding the downside of the pandemic in all spheres of our lives and the majority has managed to adjust to the new reality, moreover, some people are really enjoying working online and cannot find justification to return back to real office lives.

Education has gone through a significant transformation as well.

You can hardly find a teacher who wasn’t confused about how to organize their studying activities, but we had to deliver classes with almost no loss in quality, which was not a walk on the beach at all. Little-by-little educators have built their confidence in performing classes online.  I myself am not an exception, and I don’t want to recall the time when shifting online was forced by circumstances, as it was similar to walking in a dark room with your eyes closed when you can’t be sure where to step and how to make the move.

Thanks to digital development

Thanks to digital development we have all sorts of apps to create various activities and in general to make the lesson interesting and engaging. Methods of teaching have also been reconsidered in a way; it is something that couldn’t be avoided. But I personally had a feeling of missing something quite important, and I couldn’t figure out what exactly till recently. 

When the idea to make Valentine’s card was expressed by one of the colleges, familiar confusion came into the picture and the question of organizing the activity with some elements of crafting.  I will lie if I say that I met the idea with enthusiasm, but I have finally recognized the missing puzzle in my teaching, crafting activities.  In spite of working with the language, crafting is a crucial element in the process especially when it comes to young learners. So the mission was to find the way and somehow to incorporate that missing element.

It took me some time to put the idea

It took me some time to put the idea, digital opportunities, and final result together and finally see the whole process from A to Z. So, here is what I did. The Padlet dashboard was a handy tool as all the students can work together at the same time and a teacher can coordinate the process. Here other dashboards like Mirror can also do the job. I was also thinking about what can be an equal digital substitution of a real card.

As Padlet has many different kinds of templates, I chose the one where students can make posts. So, at that moment I finally understood how to make it work. Having set up an appropriate background, I found some pics with hearts online and posted them on the board. The students who didn’t want to bother too much could write greetings using one of the offered pics, more creative ones could look for other pictures on the Internet and make the complete post from scratch. Also in the settings, I had allowed to ‘like’ other posts, the option was accepted quite positively, and my students liked each other’s digital cards quite a lot. So, the mission was completed! The result is demonstrated in the picture above.

The Bottom Line

I am sure that someone can claim that it can hardly be called crafting. Well, considering the circumstances and the fact that kids are more confident digital users than we are, it is worth doing something other than nothing at all. I hope you enjoyed lockdown Valentine’s day both professionally and privately! Enjoy your coffee!

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