In line with the school’s celebration of its 115th founding anniversary and as part of the Edu Fest, the Basic Education Unit spearheaded by Dr. Glenda P. Caronan, (Principal, Basic Education Unit) conducted a webinar on technology -enabled teaching-learning strategies on March 30, 2022 with the theme “Fostering Sustainability Through Quality and Technology-Driven Learning.” 242 participants from various Paulinian schools joined the well-anticipated webinar via Zoom.
Sr. Merceditas Ang SPC (University President), graced the webinar with her inspirational talk emphasizing on technology-enabled teaching and its advantages in making teaching and learning more engaging and meaningful.
Ms. Mary Grace Ramos- Espiel, MaEd, an English teacher and a school paper adviser at the Quezon City Science High school served as the resource speaker of the plenary session. In her talk which was entitled From Old School to e-School: Online Strategies, Ms. Mary Grace engaged the participants to write down about the good things and the challenges that both learners and educators faced in online learning through Padlet, an online platform and majority of the participants mentioned about efficiency of online learning and so with internet’s limitations especially on bandwidth. She highlighted on online teaching strategies to cater the needs of the learners and the over all aim of going from old school to e-school which was to carry out effective instruction while keeping both educators and students sane despite the perils they experience and be able to survive the challenges in online teaching and learning.
The first strategy that she discussed in response to online teaching is to plan and to make things better for the succeeding academic year. Hence, she reiterated what educators could expect from their students to achieve in their current conditions and on the modality, they embrace, how will the students achieve their goals, what teaching strategies can help in achieving such goals and what topics that need to be covered. She also discussed on the second strategy that when teachers are to set clear expectations, they need to post behavior expectations in every live discussion, find positive reinforcement, set clear due dates and explain reasons why students need to do the tasks assigned to them. She also explained that educators need to adopt a teaching-learning design and set an example of merging three important components in creating educational experience such as cognitive presence, social presence and teaching presence.
She also highlighted to use technology intentionally which means that educators must utilize the use of technology in their instruction to achieve their objectives such as to make students more engaged and more motivated to learn. In the fifth strategy, she mentioned about humanized learning. Here she explained that this strategy aims to increase relevance of content and improve students’ motivation, thus, educators become humans by creating a community, being consistent and emphasizing care towards learners. As she wrapped up her talk, she reiterated that e-school teaching is just like how it is in old, thus “it is still about good teaching”.
After the plenary, the participants were invited in the different breakout sessions on different teaching demonstrations utilizing gamifications and online strategies such as Quizalize, QuizWhizzer, Nearpod, Socrative, Wordwall, Quizziz, Padlet, Faultfinder, Flocabulary, Desmos, Showme, Geogebra, Kahoot, Buncee, Mentimeter, Slido, SapOne, Lecturio and Labster. The teacher demonstrators were from different levels from Grade School to Tertiary, all from the host school.
