“I believe that online education will be greatly strengthened from now on”

We didn’t re­alise ex­actly how big it was at first. One of the teach­ers said it was very se­ri­ous, but we didn’t imag­ine that 10 months later we’d still be im­mersed in it.

That Fri­day was very chaotic, there was no clear news of how it af­fected ex­tracur­ric­u­lar ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing com­pa­nies, every­thing came through third par­ties... Un­for­tu­nately the same thing has hap­pened with these lat­est re­stric­tions, but this time we were ready for it.

Yes, it was time to think about how to adapt to stay afloat and, thanks to the fact that I have young chil­dren with much bet­ter tech­no­log­i­cal knowl­edge than mine and who are used to using so­cial media, we de­cided to fol­low a strat­egy through the Google Class­room plat­form, cre­at­ing What­sapp groups and using video­con­fer­enc­ing ser­vices, such as Google Meet or Skype.... It was im­por­tant to cre­ate a vir­tual struc­ture sim­i­lar to the face-to-face struc­ture that ex­ists in the school...

The tech­ni­cal prob­lems, de­spite being there, have not stopped us work­ing and al­ter­na­tives have been of­fered to peo­ple who had con­nec­tiv­ity prob­lems. Com­pli­ance with se­cu­rity mea­sures has be­come part of the every-day, which de­spite the ef­fort it re­quired, can now be ob­served prop­erly. From the first day of re­stric­tions teach­ers adapted to all the changes and this has been fun­da­men­tal in keep­ing the school op­er­at­ing. As for the stu­dents, more vari­ables came into play: some adults have been af­fected by over­work due to the pan­demic and have had to quit, oth­ers did not want to do on­line classes as they pre­fer face-to-face; also some par­ents have had work prob­lems and have had to cut down on ex­penses... These prob­lems brought a new ex­pe­ri­ence and forced us to in­te­grate new teach­ing strate­gies. This past No­vem­ber I took a course taught by Cam­bridge to im­prove on­line classes and I passed this knowl­edge on to the whole team; it was about know­ing how to op­ti­mise the in­fi­nite and high-qual­ity on­line re­sources for teach­ing avail­able to us. In fact, we are con­stantly re­cy­cling.

I ac­ci­den­tally dis­cov­ered it as a teacher due to the cir­cum­stances, but I think that the com­bi­na­tion of face-to-face and on­line classes is good, be­cause al­though there is real con­tact be­tween the mem­bers of the group in the face-to-face class, on­line you have ac­cess and ex­po­sure to the lat­est teach­ing re­sources im­me­di­ately, a dif­fer­ent re­la­tion­ship be­tween stu­dents and teacher and, in­ter­est­ingly, more par­tic­i­pa­tion by all mem­bers. Most stu­dents are very ac­cus­tomed to using so­cial media and search­ing on­line, and are very com­fort­able in front of a screen, so it’s never a prob­lem; there’s also a pro­file of stu­dent, rather shy, who be­comes closer and more re­cep­tive in front of a screen. In fact, in on­line class groups, the image of the teacher is closer, and if good group co­he­sion can be es­tab­lished, a com­plic­ity is cre­ated be­tween the par­tic­i­pants that is not the same as in face-to-face classes. After the pan­demic, I be­lieve that on­line ed­u­ca­tion will be greatly strength­ened by pro­vid­ing other op­tions and al­ter­na­tives.

Yes, we have had help from the state and a lit­tle help from the city coun­cil. Al­though it’s not enough, as this pan­demic has af­fected the en­rol­ment of two school years and is very likely to harm a third. Now there’s help from the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment for all com­pa­nies that pro­vide ex­tracur­ric­u­lar ac­tiv­i­ties and train­ing. We will have to see if all this aid has been enough in the medium term, as the self-em­ployed have suf­fered very sig­nif­i­cant losses and many busi­nesses have closed down.