The Coronavirus pandemic has changed our lives massively. Although it continues to rise constantly, many countries are now planning to resume offices and educational institutions. Due to that teachers are facing unusual hurdles and parents are worried about how schools will look like if they’re-open during the pandemic.
Moreover, there are many other questions attached to this situation. How teachers can keep students engaged when hands-on activities are limited? How can parents manage kids’ schedules when studies and school timings are uncertain?
And if at all, remote learning continues, how to handle its drawbacks? Zoom, Microsoft, Google, and Apple have come up with multiple measures and tools to resolve such situations.
What Are The New Challenges To Kids’ Study?
Parents have a lot to manage during these tough times. Adapting to the new routine of kids, managing fears of COVID-19, handling kids’ activities with safe social distancing, managing their own work crisis, etc will add-on to parents’ duties.
Moreover, educational institutions will also undergo tremendous stress when they reopen school. Managing safety precautions without compromising on kids ‘study will be a challenge.
For that, schools may need to plan overall workflow, manage the safety of teachers and students, minimize class size (to avoid the mass of students), etc. Also, promoting healthy practices, handling essential cleaning processes, managing safe meal preparations, etc will be critical to handle.
However, most of the teachers and institutes still favor remote learning and may include online study even the school-reopens. Minimizing classes and occupying kids with online learning projects are globally accepted strategies to continue education in this pandemic.
What Are The Drawbacks Of Remote Learning?
No doubt, remote learning provides safe education opportunities but it has its own challenges. Teachers need to be tech-smart to release a new study course on every next session. Internet connection has to be strong and uninterrupted on both teacher and kids’ side.
Moreover, parents also need to be tech-friendly. They should know all the online platforms, how to connect, enroll, and how to support kids learning lessons. Also, apps used for video conferencing are not safe for kids. We all remember how apps like Zoom have proved to be nasty in the past.
Apart from all these, the biggest setback of remote learning is distracting apps and online platforms that easily divert kids’ attention. According to child experts, kids’ screen time has increased massively during the lockdown.
Kids easily get diverted when they study and some social media notification blinks on their device. That is why globally the usage of child monitoring apps has increased a lot.
An effective kids safety app such as Bit Guardian Parental Control acts as an Android app blocker. It blocks all the unsuitable and addictive apps from kids’ devices. It is renowned as one of the best parenting apps of 2020 for its effective screen time control tools.
Additionally, this app helps kids to study by limiting their screen obsessions. Overall it helps parents to limit, monitor, and protect kids’ online lives.
How Tech-Giants Are Supporting Remote Study?
While the majority of teachers are advocating to continue remote learning, a few companies are trying hard to limit the risks attached to E-learning.
- Zoom
With new reliable features, recently, Zoom claimed to be a safer and better video conferencing service to facilitate remote schooling in the upcoming months.
With new controls to reduce disruptions and enhancing tools related to focus groups, Zoom becomes better.
To prevent Zoom bombings, Zoom offers an option to teachers that only allows verified users to join. Instructors/parents can also require a meeting passcode to join.
Apart from that, teachers can disable video for individual students and build a customized virtual classroom seating pattern. Zoom also offers – “Mute All Participants” option.
- Microsoft
Microsoft enhanced its support and offers various tools specially geared toward remote and hybrid learning conditions.
It offers a “Together Mode” for video calls, which brings all students into the same view to imitate what generally a teacher sees in his traditional classroom.
With Live Reactions and Live Captions for video meetings, Microsoft also enhances accessibility. More than 180,000 learning institutions currently use Microsoft as their learning assistant and this tech-giant promises to come up with more safe and reliable features in near future.
- Apple
Apple also offers new tools to help educators and students in today’s distance learning situation.
Its Classroom app offers an updated version that is more user-friendly. In addition to this it also provides guided learning and shared assignments to facilitate virtual learning.
Google announces multiple virtual education tools to simplify the learning process. It adds a larger tile to the Google Meet conferencing platform that supports 49 meeting participants at the same time.
Generally, teachers complain that it becomes very challenging for them to keep kids engaged during the virtual classroom. So, a spokesperson from Google has shared that they are introducing a whole set of tools that deliver the best practices from an in-person classroom into the digital class.
With these tools and features it will be better for teachers to do virtual lessons even if they are in the classroom.
