From Taguatinga-DF / Brazil.
Monday. August 17, 2020.
Every day I feel more pressure for this graduation year and the next steps in my academic life.
Today, Monday, the classes scheduled on the platform are Portuguese, arts, and mathematics. To my disappointment, none of the three subjects had a meeting to teach the subject.
However, the Portuguese held the meeting “online” just to clear up doubts about this coming week. Generally, when the teacher does not attend virtually, during the time of his class, he places a video and exercises, or a PDF explaining said content so that we can study them and thus learn them.
The only difference, in my point of view, is that the teachers of the Portuguese and mathematics subjects are the only ones who prepare the annexes or videos, with comments about the classes.
The Arts teacher demands another strategy — riskier — which involves sending videos of another teacher’s material, explaining the content she wants to transmit. This methodology sometimes complicates understanding because the explanations of a new teacher explaining differently and without us being able to clear doubts, creates a sensation of loose pieces of class, without content unity.
Tuesday. August 18, 2020.
Today, the last day of my DIARY, I woke up with the strange sensation of writing something for the future, even without knowing the repercussions.
I direct my attention to the classes. I do my morning hygiene, I drink my coffee, I sit down to study. I turn on the computer and … Like yesterday, I only had a class through “Google Meet”.
The only class of the day was Sociology, to resolve doubts about the grades from the first two months that were released on August 8.
On the subject of Arts, new content was published for this week, but without personal explanations from the teacher. What I see are explanatory videos of third parties, with activities related to the subject. I give up…
Regarding the Geography class, the teacher only published the content about what we are going to discuss the next day because she meets with the students to ask questions and teach the subject, in a class during the week, generally on Wednesdays. However, her method is effective, since it prepares us for the next day’s content, which will be taught by the online meeting or class. Thus, my classmates and I feel in this class that we are capable of carrying out the activities that are proposed on the content taught. These activities that the teacher offers us are formulated as evaluative and face-to-face counters.
My final records:
What I could observe during this week of “surveillance” of the “online” classes, during the meetings of the two platforms that were presented here — with the opinion of other students as well —, is that many teachers are using different methods to teach the to import.
Some of these methods are effective when the teachers themselves are in charge of explaining their methodology, in the virtual classroom.
Regarding the functioning of the platforms and technical defects related to lighting, sound, and image, the problems only occurred in the first months when teachers were still adjusting. However, with other teachers of different subjects, videos from different channels are used and sent to us on the platform to “learn” the content. This method may not be as effective as the other, as teachers don’t always see comments and when questions arise about the video, they don’t always answer them.
I observe that only two of my teachers post videos of their creation. The others post YouTube, third party, and teacher videos. What helps us the most in this period relates to fixing the content of the disciplines, are the proposed exercises, since through them it is possible to investigate the subject in question, and understand if the subject of the day’s lesson has taken place.
We are in a period of educational reorganization, learning every day how to adapt our classes, both teachers and students so that we can extract growth from this pandemic moment in which education and teaching were restarted by the pandemic. It is a difficult time, building a lot that was and is being destroyed.
Finally, it was a consensus among all the students I asked, that they prefer face-to-face classes.
This August 18, 2020, I close my ONBOARD DIARY, knowing that the journey continues and that it will not be easy …
