More than 1,500 teachers have already participated in Soitron’s interactive webinars delivered using Microsoft tools. By mid-March 2020 more than twenty webinars had been organized for Czech and Slovak schools in various regions, and interest continues to grow.
Due to school closures in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, teachers are dealing with a difficult challenge: how to use modern technologies for online teaching. Soitron is helping educators to address this situation by organizing online webinars designed exclusively for teachers, principals, and network administrators.
In these webinars, educators and students receive many useful tips on how to use the tools of Microsoft Office 365 Education, including Microsoft Teams desktop and mobile applications.
“Webinars are undoubtedly something that people have started to appreciate as a tool. Perhaps the time of hybrid education is coming in which this form of learning will become widely used even in primary schools. For quite a while now, we have been offering training to educational institutions and we automatically complement it with webinars for trainees to refresh what they have learnt,”
JIŘÍ CHYTIL
Education consultant at Soitron in the Czech Republic
Teachers have highly praised the webinar on how to create written assignments using Microsoft Forms. For example, it allows teachers to create a maths test within a few minutes and easily share them with students. All webinars also include an introduction to the functionality of OneNote, which can be used for taking notes and uploading lessons remotely.
Webinars on how to communicate using Microsoft Teams are also very popular. Tomáš Milička, a computer science and mathematics teacher at GPOA Znojmo, collaborated on one of these webinars.
“The main advantage of using Microsoft Teams for teaching is that students can communicate with each other right away. They can immediately ask anything, and in my experience, they are much more active than in the regular classroom. On top of that, the lesson is recorded so that the students can revisit it any time and study the topic at their own convenience,” says Milička, adding that one of the great bonuses of the webinars is the forming of communities of teachers who are interested in receiving continued assistance from Soitron in this field.
In these difficult times, Soitron is helping individual teachers as well as schools and is able to implement the presented benefits of online teaching very quickly. The Kysucké Nové Mesto Grammar School is a perfect example. Microsoft Office 365 was implemented there in an extremely short time.
„Na základě informací z webinářů nás paní ředitelka gymnázia požádala o pomoc při nasazení a nastavení Office 365. Vypracovala podklady a seznam učitelů i studentů. My jsme následně vytvořili prostředí MS Office 365, ověřili a přidali doménu a následně vytvořili profily žáků.“
MARTIN KAMENIAR
Cloud infrastructure team leader at Soitron in Slovakia
Thanks to the well-prepared background documents and excellent cooperation with the principal, everything was set up in two hours over a weekend. The following week, students started using their online accounts. “Of course, we continue to help. At two other schools, the Microsoft Office 365 set-up is nearly completed as well,” adds Kameniar, who is involved in this activity together with his colleague, the education consultant Michal Podroužek.
Soitron reminds teachers that Minecraft: Education Edition, an interactive educational version of the world-renowned Minecraft game, is available to students for free until the end of June 2020.
“I have been teaching with Minecraft for more than three years. The first thing we built in it was a model of our own school. This was a great half-year-long project over the course of which children learned perhaps more than with any previous teaching method. And now Minecraft is part of my curriculum. We have been learning to code in it for half a year. It uses 3D modelling, which helps students to develop their spatial imagination. As this is a real-world simulation, we can use it to solve real-world problems,” says Miroslav Kotlas, an experienced computer science teacher from a grammar school in České Budějovice, who encourages teachers not to be afraid of online teaching tools.
“You can do it too. You can get support from Microsoft training centres scattered throughout the country or from companies such as Soitron that would help you with a comprehensive solution. All that is left for you to do is to teach and enjoy it,” adds Kotlas.
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