It looks like schools in Ontario and perhaps a large number of countries will be remaining closed at least until May. The Ministry of Education here in Omtario was calling for the community to use technology to support the students learning under such critical circumstances. School boards are actively promoting the online resources that they have and hope that parents can start homeschooling their children as if they are sitting inside the classroom.
It is worthy to point out that e-learning is not learning at home with digital resources, e-learning requires experienced teachers to deliver the structured content to the students with the help of the accessible systems.
Now, we can see that the community is all involved to look for learning resources for the kids who are at home. We feel relieved that the kids can finally settle down to their new routine. Yes, these resources are helpful and engaging as the complement of the daily teaching activities at school. Nevertheless, the circumstance has changed. The parents are not school teachers, they do not even know where to find appropriate curriculum for the school age kids, they can not use the resources properly to meet the kids needs. Therefore, the consequence can be destructive, either the kids are not challenged enough or they are overwhelmed by the unstructured resources that parents push in front of them. Is there any hope that the students are ready to move to the new grade when the virus is gone? The answer is unknown to most of us.
No matter what, the teachers and the interaction with students are the most important elements to carry out this new e-Learning or learning at home trend. Between them is the key which is the high quality learning materials.
KNiTO provides the tools such as AUTHORING studio.knito.com and INTERACTIVE interactive.knito.com to help teachers generate engaging learning materials in the form of ePUB 3 books. Students can access it anytime and anywhere. At the authoring studio, teachers can upload their lesson plan and enrich them with audio ( narration), video ( youtube links or teacher’s home-made videos), tables, diagrams, gamification, meanwhile, the after/in class tests can also be inserted in the lesson plan, interactive has plenty of such to choose from, multiple choices, True/False questions, dialog cards, image hotspots, collage etc. Since it will be a short or long ePUB 3 books, it can be directly exported to KNiTO book store store.knito.com After the students download them, the teachers will be able to check with the built in analytic tools to see how many have opened it and how long the students have been spending time on each book. Of course, the teachers in the same grades or school can also work together to edit and review one book, it is just like the process of publishing simple ebooks by yourself. The teacher still has the freedom to choose to publish this book or not, if not publishing, the inviting code can be generated and sent to students or his/her peers. See the detailed guide here: https://support.knito.com/hc/en-us
We hope that the features of KNiTO can assist educators in e-Learning under the pandemic background and continue to support the learning activity across the world.www.knito.com