As you probably know from the news headlines, Coronavirus has been a major issue in almost every country around the world. In Korea, there are around 7,000 people who have been confirmed as patients and the number keeps increasing.
All the schools in South Korea have been told to close (you can read about that strange day here) and we needed some methods to ensure that the how-ever-long break was educational.
Since we couldn’t go to school, the school was brought to us. Online learning was something that was quite new to us — even though we used computers, lessons were always in-person. From Tuesday, the 25th of February, there was a Google Classroom set up for every subject where teachers could assign tasks and announce important notices. As students, we would complete them within the lesson time and submit them.
Some classes were more interactive. By using Hangouts Meet, a tool used for video conferences, we were able to see each others’ faces and feel like we were in school! The video-chat lessons kept us engaged in what could have been a boring month. Of course, it’s not perfect; the sounds are quite muffled and the video lags sometimes.
Still, this situation is something that has never happened before in our school, and the way that we are handling it is the best way possible — even though there are some sacrifices to be made.
Did you know, that Google made the premium features of Hangouts Meet free, in order to help businesses and schools operate digitally even with Coronavirus? They are planning to do this till July 1st; I think it’s a great way to show a company cares about their consumers.
The school closure policy was updated to tell us that we’re going to continue the online learning experience until the end of March and break off into the Easter Holiday. When we get back, around the first week of April, I hope the situation comes to a positive close.