Abstract:

As in almost all aspects of life, the COVID19 pandemic had a strong impact on the educational systems across the world. Most countries shifted schools to the form of distance learning. In Croatia, schools went completely online from March 2020 until the end of the 2019/2020 school year. Such an urgent transition impacted the whole educational system, from technical to pedagogical issues for both teachers and students. Informatics is a separate school subject in Croatia since the early 1990s'. Considering such status of the informatics school subject, it is possible that transition to online school went easier compared to other countries with no informatics as a separate school subject. Informatics teachers are primarily trained at the Universities following the curriculum for computer science teachers. Therefore, Informatics teachers in Croatia are educated not only for conducting informatics classes but also for technical and software maintenance of the equipment necessary for conducting Informatics classes. However, the primary role of informatics teachers is teaching, not technical maintenance. Based on such background of Informatics teachers, we can assume that the shift to distance learning relied fell on them. We surveyed 538 elementary and high school teachers across the country to investigate the teachers' coping in distance learning. This paper focuses on the technical perspective in shifting on the distant learning in COVID19 pandemic outbreak circumstances. The results showed that informatics teachers had a significant role in conducting online school from technical and supportive roles to other teachers. Along with the teacher role, informatics teachers mostly felt overloaded and inadequately compensated for their work. Our findings could be used as guidelines for future Informatics teacher education for their preparation for online teaching. The findings of the research are in detail presented in this paper.

Keywords:

Curriculum, informatics, programming, elementary school, attitudes.