Has COVID-19 changed the way we teach forever?

In early 2020, COVID quickly spread around the world. The world in which we lived changed drastically as countries and their governments around the world implemented a number of different strategies to contain, mitigate, and live with COVID. Our communities changed over-night [1] as movement was often tightly restricted and social distancing was widely practised

Our educational communities also changed at a pace that we had scarcely seen before; technology, the internet, and online learning, changed the classroom as we knew it. For many teachers, this was not what they had envisioned for their classroom; in-person interaction quickly became virtual and many scrambled to find suitable technology to engage and enhance their new online classrooms [2].

Previous adoption of technology has been historically slow to implement within the field of education, often spurned as an unnecessary addition to an educator’s heavy workload. However, COVID has changed the need to use technology, both inside and outside of the classroom. Of course saw technology being adopted within education was happening before the pandemic with technologies like the classroom management system ClassDojo as well as others being adopted [3] and the use of Turn It In in the world of higher education helping to easily detect plagiarism, but these technologies were often decentralised processes or inconsistently implemented.

As the world now thankfully returns to pre-COVID protocols and the restrictions we faced in our personal and professional lives are lifted, has this dramatic time of our lives altered the way we approach technology in the classroom?

As we return to the world and as we return to the classroom, we predict that technology will play an ever growing role in the field of education. The use of classroom management systems will be implemented at a greater pace, online learning environments such as Microsoft Teams and Google Classroom will stay with us as a method of connecting educators to their communities. Innovative technologies like Students’ Voice will help educators, teams and institutions to monitor feedback and data proactively. Technology adoption in the field of education will grow at a faster rate as we embrace this different world we now find ourselves in. Will we find ourselves in the era of ‘teachnology’?

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