Abstract:

The last two years have brought significant changes into education as the COVID-19 pandemic and several waves of school closures have not only influenced the everyday work of schools and teachers when teaching remotely, but a more frequent use of digital technologies penetrated the direct educational practice in the classroom. The experienced emergency remote teaching made teachers rethink the forms and methods of education they had applied before the outbreak of the pandemic, to find efficient alternatives and new strategies to be used with various groups of students. Experience has shown that some of the newly designed activities can be well applied in the classroom as well as they are attractive to students and have the potential to stimulate their learning.

In the proposed paper, the relevant results of a questionnaire survey on secondary school teachers’ experiences with newly developed online methods and strategies gained during the first two COVID-19 pandemic waves in 2020 and 2021 are presented with a special attention paid to the opportunities to implement them in classroom-based education as well. Within an ongoing research project focusing on new opportunities for student competence development in the digital environment brought by the involuntary transfer from on-site to distance teaching, two questionnaire surveys have been carried out on the sample of secondary school teachers who, in June 2020, were questioned about their experiences with distance teaching during the first wave of the pandemic, and, in the academic year 2020/2021 on their experiences gained during the second pandemic wave by means of author-constructed questionnaires. Additionally, in October 2021, selected respondents from the same research sample were interviewed and asked whether they used or intended to use any of the online activities, methods, or strategies in the classroom environment under standard, non-crisis conditions. The interviews provided us with qualitative data and a deeper insight into the examined field. The results show that even though teachers perceive teaching remotely difficult, they admit that it provided them with space for innovations and creativity. They identified certain fields and pedagogical situations when using digital technologies is more efficient compared with traditional classroom-based activities and it is also more attractive to students.

Keywords:

Teachers, distance teaching, classroom-based education, digital technologies, new methods and strategies.