Traditional learning strategies no longer apply in this new normal. In partnership with LEAD Philippines, find out how schools can cope and overcome the current situation through the innovative tools and digital solutions available.
If you missed the session, watch the full recap here.
Featured Speakers:
Ivy Liezl Vinluan
Project Implementation and Evaluation Officer (Knowledge Channel Foundation, Inc.)
Edison Superable
Sales Cluster Head (Globe myBusiness)
Marz Fernandez
Regional Sales Head (Globe myBusiness)
Jonathan Barrientos
ICT Account Manager (Globe myBusiness)
HELPFUL PRODUCT INFORMATION
Learn more about how Globe myBusiness can help your school. Download our product guide here.
There’s hardly anyone exempt from feeling the weight of the COVID-19 crisis. With schools on suspension as part of the preventive social distancing measures, school owners and administrators are left to deal with some serious, looming questions: What’s the best way to minimize impacts and keep school operations running while obediently putting everyone’s safety first? Consider these tips on how you can prevent crises, respond to your students’ needs, ease their worries, and sustain your business every step of the way.
Can lessons carry on with school closed for a longer period than usual? The answer is a definite yes, if you fortify the systems that you might have already put in place.
Tip #1: Keep your socials up-to-date
Make sure school websites and social media accounts are updated for important announcements. While students, parents, and school staff are still making the necessary adjustments during this period, not all of them might have stable internet connection right away. With social media being easier to access, this gets important information through faster.
Tip #2: Make room at home
Encourage your school’s teachers, students, and parents to have a dedicated workspace at home. For students, having a designated well-lit space where they park their devices (laptop/desktop, tablet, etc.) helps to prime them for school work. Make sure your teachers and students have good and stable connectivity for online learning.
Tip #3: Maximize distance learning platforms
Ease your school teachers’ worries by securing distance learning platforms. Edmodo lets educators use multimedia materials for their lessons, and students to access textbooks, personalized learning content, and a virtual library. Learning.com, on the other hand, helps teachers link technology into their curriculum and evaluate students’ performances. Brightspace allows teachers design courses, access learner reports, and customize other learning tools. This will keep teachers and their students inspired.
Tip #4: Make the most out of the situation
While no one wants to feel stuck in this situation, make the most out of it. Keep students engaged and energized by using fun online tools like Kahoot, BrainPop, Tynker, Outschool, Udemy, iReady, Beast Academy, Khan Academy, Creative Bug, Scholastic, All-In-One Homeschool, and Discovery Education.
Integrate videos while teaching from Youtube channels like Science Channel, National Geographic Kids, Free School, TheBrainScoop, ScienceMax, and more. Inspire daily activities with notes from websites Splash Learn, PBS Kids, Star Fall, Storyline Online, or Fun Brain.
Tip #1: Establish a communal work-from-home setup
Operations seem trickier to maneuver outside a physical school structure, but it doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Convene with your employees online and agree on a reasonable system and mutual hours where everyone is available and reachable.
Since not everyone might be able to access a remote working setup, identify which roles are the most vital so that you can focus on a lean skeletal group who does the most essential tasks. Ensure that you provide them with the necessary tools that allow your team to work wherever they are, such as stable connectivity and fast, convenient software and apps that let them get in touch with the others virtually such as Google Workspace (previously known as G Suite), Hangouts, and Zoom.
Tip #2: Secure your business and your team
The most important and serious challenge is, of course, security. Check up with your staff regularly using the online channels mentioned in the items above. Make sure everyone is safe, and find out if anyone needs help through a dedicated chat group. Dedicate time to hear out their concerns. This way, you can address these by adjusting your current business continuity policies that take their pressing concerns into consideration.
Your business continuity policies should outline how you plan to asses risks, find out how the risks will affect operations, carry out procedures to lessen the risks, test the procedures if they work, and review the process. This way, you can better manage the next phases your institution will face in the coming weeks or months.
Tip #3: Be alert and informed
Fake information poses a real threat, and perpetrators of these are becoming increasingly clever. Fact check all the information you share with your team and urge them to do the same. Only get your information from verified websites. Unverified claims about COVID-19 can cost people dearly — like myths about how bathing in hot water, alcohol and chlorine “rid” one of the virus. Once your information is all properly vetted, blast it to your team, parents, and students through your chat groups or social media page.
Need more help in making the digital shift? Get in touch with us here. For COVID-19 concerns, the DOH hotline is (02) 894-COVID.
Stay safe! Build up your immunity, set up your contingency measures and school crisis response, and get verified updates as often as you can. Feel free to share this to your colleagues and friends — this could help them too.
Learn more about how Globe myBusiness can help your school. Download our product guide here.
Find out from industry experts how you can integrate tools and activities to maximize your school ecosystem and students’ learning, even when you can’t meet face-to-face.
If you missed the session, watch the recap here.
Featured Speakers:
HELPFUL PRODUCT INFORMATION:
Edmodo, is a classroom management tool that shares content and communicates with colleagues, parents, and students.
Help your faculty stay updated and learn the best practices from each other with Google Workspace (previously known as Google Workspace (previously known as G Suite). It offers productivity solutions for email, shared calendar, cloud storage, and much more, including the video conferencing software Google Hangouts Meet. Want to learn more? Click here.
Send important announcements to the entire school community with a single tap with M360. More information here.
Coordinate everything with your staff even on-the-go using Globe Business Starter 399. Learn more here.
Cater to teachers’ immediate need for uninterrupted online connection while teaching from home with the Prepaid Internet Kit. Click here for more information.
Learn more about how Globe myBusiness can help your school. Download our product guide here.
When the COVID-19 outbreak was declared as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on January 30, 2020 (before it was announced as a pandemic on March 11, 2020), the education sector all around the world have already had their fingers on the pulse, watching for news and updates to better prepare their institutions for new regulations or even cancellation.
In the Philippines, even before the announcement of the initial community quarantine on March 15, schools cancelled classes mostly in Metro Manila. The decision was later adopted throughout the country. This resulted in over 849.4 million children and youth worldwide having their education disrupted.
With schools closed, learning can be delayed. Eventually, a child might fall behind in their studies. Schools, parents, and students are seeking ways to continue their education without disruption.
Schools have to adjust to new ways of teaching. From daily assignments, emailed projects, to online sessions, it’s evident that technology plays a huge role in continuing education at home.
But how can this be carried out safely, consistently, and as effectively as face-to-face classroom teaching? This guide will help you implement homeschooling measures that work for your school — from remote working operation plans, considering childcare, to ensuring the continuity of education. This will help administrators plan for teaching, learning, and research as well as address concerns related to COVID-19.
Share Facts, Not Fakes
As school administrators and employers, it’s an important responsibility to discern and stay updated and on COVID-19’s activity.
Other than sending information only from verified and reputable sources to your school community (we’ve listed here websites to check), educate everyone on how to do proper fact-checking. Post this on your school’s communication channels such as social media, e-mail, or group chats. This way, employees, parents, and students will think twice before sharing COVID-19 related news and stories and keep an atmosphere of trust and support in your online communities.
Reinforce Hygiene and Cleanliness
How can schools inform faculty, parents, and students on proper hygiene and cleanliness now that they’re learning at home? It’s vital to keep them informed and educated so that the entire school community is kept safe.
For students, integrating hygiene and COVID-19 awareness topics into school work will help establish good habits and the importance of sticking to them. Young students will benefit from age-appropriate materials such as posters or videos, which can be sent via email, posted on social media, and sent through group chats. Reaction papers, video presentations, and art activities can be applied for older students.
Advisers or parent coordinators should take advantage of group chats to release proper hygiene guidelines for the home or even scheduled reminders to prompt caregivers on what to do. Send infographics or guidelines they can print. The Center For Disease Control And Prevention (CDC) has handwashing resources that include health promotion materials, information on proper handwashing technique, and tips for families to help children develop good handwashing habits that they can use.
Once the regular school sessions have resumed, routinely clean frequently touched surfaces like doorknobs, light switches, and counter tops with household cleaners and disinfectants. Use all cleaning products according to the directions on the label. Teach students to wipe down items like keyboards, desks, remote controls, and the like with disposable disinfectant wipes or paper towel and alcohol before each use. Implement targeted health education and integrate disease prevention and control in daily activities and lessons to remind students, parents, and teachers to wash hands, clean up, and avoid face touching.
Use Multiple Communication Channels
To make sure everyone is informed and on the same page, update all your communication channels: website, social media, messaging apps, and even your mobile or landline number. This is where mass message blasts come into play as well. Remind everyone to always refer to these only to avoid confusion. You can also encourage a call-tree like set-up to cascade important announcements to smaller groups, like grade level and section representatives. This will allow parents and students to have a specific person they can raise any concerns to and get feedback from immediately. On your end, it will be easier for you to coordinate with key persons who will already filter and consolidate concerns from their groups, instead of your entire community at large.
Maximize Collaboration Tools
To prepare for remote working and learning without disruption, ensure faculty and students have a stable internet connection. Employees may utilize productivity tools and collaborate using Google Workspace (previously known as G Suite), Microsoft Office 365, and similar solutions. Teachers can also back-up, share, and edit large amounts of files like classroom discussions and written requirement submissions instantaneously through tools like Google Drive, iCloud, or Dropbox.
Set Aside An Area For Studies
Implement e-learning plans and distance learning options for students. Use existing infrastructure and services such as Blackboard, Skype, or Zoom for lectures, reports, and presentations for both teachers and students.
Distance learning may also include using strategies such as faculty check-ins, recorded class meetings or lectures, and live class meetings. You can use tools and apps such as Edmodo for this. It pays to invest on distance-learning solutions to be digital-ready, especially for crises that your school can face in the future.
Tools like Edmodo streamline school-wide communication, making messages, class materials, and learning easily accessible for free. Parents are also updated and stay in sync with teachers, empowered to support continuous learning at home.
Other means of student support such as library services, print materials, or quizzes can be made available online. Different digital media can also support study groups, even teacher-student or parent-teacher chats. Universities may opt to provide free online databases for students to access using their student identity information. Here’s a list of recommended online platforms to utilize.
In this day and age, children and young people are considered global citizens: powerful agents of change. They are the next generation of caregivers, scientists, and doctors. This crisis presents the opportunity to help them learn, cultivate compassion, and increase resilience while building a safer and more caring community. Having information and facts about COVID-19 will help diminish students’ fears and anxieties around the disease. It can even support their ability to cope with this pandemic’s impact in their lives. With digital-based work and learning, students, parents, teachers, and school administrators can stay ahead with assurance during this time of crisis.
Stay safe, only get COVID-19 updates from reputable sources, and share this important guide to your colleagues and friends. The DOH COVID hotline number is (02) 894-COVID.
Learn more about how Globe myBusiness can help your school. Download our product guide here.
For concerns on your Globe myBusiness subscription, contact (02) 7780-1010.
When factors like a crisis hits a locale, education can be put on hold through interrupted schedules and class suspensions. In the case of COVID-19, when people are asked to stay safely at home for weeks, everything including time seems to have come to a stop. However, instances like this give educators an opportunity to think about ways to extend learning outside the walls of a classroom. This is where distance education comes in.
Distance education or distance learning is a digital strategy that future-ready schools are applying into their systems. In a nutshell, it’s remote-based with flexibility in mind. Lectures, assignments, reports, and tests are carried out online, removing the challenges of commuting and added expenses from the hands of parents and students.
This is also just the kind of learning environment digital natives, where the current generation of learners are, thrive in. UNESCO talked about how to teach these digital natives who need immediacy and mobility prioritized. Because they’re “native speakers of the digital language,” they’re hyper-connected and move quickly from one activity to another – considerations when understanding the best ways to teach them nowadays.
Need a sound learning-from-home system that works for your institution? Check out these tips.
When faces are absent, clear and constant communication is more important than ever. Update and utilize your school website, social media accounts, messaging apps, and mobile number to get your community relying on your official channels.
Create internal messaging groups with faculty members for easy sharing of important news and learnings. Reassure parents and students that the channels you’ve set up will be constantly updated and that your school can be quickly reached through them.
Social media may be the easiest to access for teachers, students, and parents, so use it for announcements. Messaging apps can immediately consolidate concerns and feedback, and easily check-in on a class or section. Message blast tools, like M360, allow for crucial advisories to reach everyone in your school in a single click. This comes in handy when the government sends notices that will affect your school, or during emergencies and disasters.
School Pro-Tip: Establish multiple official communication channels with the same account names so students and families can find you easily. Ideally, announcements should be posted on each account simultaneously with the exact same message to avoid any confusion.
We know that online is different from the traditional talk-and-chalk classroom approach, but this doesn’t mean you can’t create the same experience in this realm.
Other than conducting classes on video chats, a way to set familiarity and structure is to encourage teachers and families to create designated work and study areas in their homes. For teachers, a strong and reliable internet connection is required and is something you can help them with. For students, have them situate their study place where the strongest signal or where the computer is. Make sure that room is well-lit and stock it with their textbooks, stationary, and other things to remind them of the school environment.
Another note to consider: a household could have multiple, different-aged students that also have household responsibilities, so be flexible in terms of activities, schedules, and workload. Alongside flexibility, it’s still best for lessons to start at a regular time, ideally similar to your classroom schedule. Being online allows educators to be flexible with their styles so that they don’t have to stick to teaching rigidly as they would in a classroom.
School Pro-Tip: Have faculty meetings via video conferences as well to help teachers become comfortable with using these in their own classes.
Put your teachers and students at ease by securing and providing them with a variety of distance learning platforms. Platforms like Edmodo allow educators to communicate, collaborate, and coach as they distribute lessons, tests, and homework and manage communication with the school community. This classroom management tool has launched a distance learning toolkit for educators and administrators, too.
You can also check out these tools and software highly recommended by teachers around the world:
Nearpod allows you to create interactive lessons. It’s easy to enhance lessons with personalized and easy-to-edit videos like Screencastify while delivering lectures online with Google Hangouts. Then, when students and parents need a recap and be given their assignments, use a messaging app like Remind, a communication platform best for remote learning. To make creating, distributing, and grading assignments easy, Google Classroom has aggregating and computing functions to help you.
Don’t forget YouTube and Facebook as possible resources too. You can use these to do live lectures or recorded lessons.
School Pro-Tip: Use a mixture of presentations, video seminars, book references, and hands-on activities if possible, to keep students interested. Remember, they have full access to their personal gadgets and hobbies at home, and it’s next to impossible to ensure that they keep these away during class hours.
With students comfortable in their own home environments during online classes, teachers can easily lose their attention. Utilize interactive tools to make learning fun.
You can hold mini tournaments to earn points and credits to keep them on their toes. Tools like Kahoot or BrainPop are perfect for that. Include making home-video based projects using apps like Seesaw. Seesaw is an online journal that allows students to take and annotate pictures, make videos, and type answers to anything.
PBS LearningMedia‘s interactive lessons make use of a wide range of free topics from the PBS library. Each lesson integrates activities that students can work on individually or in groups, and save for their teachers to view online.
Social Emotional Learning (SEL) can continue in a distance learning setting as well. Just as you can use Google Hangouts to be there for your students and maintain your classroom culture, you can provide other ways for students to share and process their emotions while away from school. Using Google Forms, create mood check-ins for students to share their emotional state on a daily basis. Within the form, students can request a conference with the teacher if they need extra support.
School Pro-Tip: Aside from quick form submissions, you can also ask students to submit quick video “confessionals” to get their thoughts on the lesson as well as feedback on the current program.
It’s important to instill the importance of learning and exploration to children; after all, it’s their right to have access to these no matter what situation they are in. So bring education outside the walls of your classroom and equip your school to continue learning no matter the circumstance.
Not sure how to start implementing your distance learning strategy? Schedule a consultation with one of our account managers here.
HELPFUL PRODUCT INFORMATION
Cater to teachers’ immediate need for uninterrupted online connection while teaching from home with the Prepaid Internet Kit. Click here for more information.
Help your faculty stay updated and learn the best practices from each other with Google Workspace (previously known as G Suite). It offers productivity solutions for email, shared calendar, cloud storage, and much more, including the video conferencing software Google Hangouts Meet. Want to learn more? Click here.
Coordinate everything with your staff even on-the-go using Globe Business Starter 399. Learn more here.
Send important announcements to the entire school community with a single tap with M360. More information here.
Learn more about how Globe myBusiness can help your school. Download our product guide here.
Edmodo, is a classroom management tool that shares content and communicates with colleagues, parents, and students.
Nearpod is an interactive lesson-creation tool designed to engage students.
Screencastify is a browser plugin allowing teachers to record their screens then edit and share them as HD videos.
Remind is a communication platform made for remote learning.
Google Classroom helps create, distribute, and grade assignments in a paperless way.
Kahoot and BrainPop are a game-based learning platforms.
Seesaw offer built-in annotation tools to capture what students know in Seesaw’s digital portfolio.
PBS LearningMedia offers a diverse media-on-demand digital content library for free.
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