National lockdown - but what about education?

Because of current Coronavirus pandemic most of the countries closed a majority of services and institutions - including schools and universities. According to UNESCO more than 1,5 billion of learners have their schools closed (as for 06.04.2020). That forced many students, teachers and lecturers to change their methods of learning and teaching. Remote learning which for many countries was something yet to come for another decades had to be started as fast as possible to avoid longer interruption of a school year. This also happend to me - I'm a student of a technical school in Poland which started conducting lessons through internet.

But how does it look in a Eastern Europe?

Many schools in Poland had already implemented some e-learning functionalities like Moodle, Microsoft Azure and Office365 but it was used mainly as a novelty. Infrastructure in Poland is not as bad as some people think - many people have access to high bandwidth internet connection, most of young poles use internet on a daily basis. But the main problem was how teachers are going to work from home - what are the procedures? can they grade students? how to conduct tests remotely?

At first it looked chaotic...

When the lockdown started we were just sent home with no further information. For a few days no one knew exactly how and when are we going to continue our education process, basically the news and people started to panic and everything was a pure mess.

After a week there was a official government statement - school activities are meant to take place via e-learning.

But It was not so easy... Many teachers in Poland were not familiar with e-learning apps and social networks. The biggest problem was to determine which app is going to be used to a communicate with students and vice versa, because the most convenient option was to choose one and teach everyone how to use it. Some opted for Skype, others for Discord, Teams or even Google Classroom - the possibilities were endless and each school was responsible to choose one. And that's when the first problems started to pop up. If we wanted to take mine school as an example I'm currently using 5 different apps to communicate with teachers and turn in exercises - Skype, Teams, Discord, Zoom, Moodle and Office365 as a whole . If that wasn't annoying enough most of them are used to do the same thing - you can communicate through a voice chat by using either Skype, Zoom, Teams or Discord. But according to the teachers each one of them likes other app more, so we have to use each one of the according to the teachers liking. 

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Hi everyone :) This is my first post on publish0x and I hope you liked it. If you want comment down below and ask me anything. I would like to do a small series where I describe how public school system works from a students perspective because It's kind of overlooked in the mainstream media right now.