Kitasuwa Elementary School in Tama City, Tokyo, is one of the public schools that has decided not to offer remote learning during its closure. Instead, school officials gave their 500 students printed fabrics to paint at home on their own.
Teachers planned to supply online courses, but gave up on the concept because they were concerned about inequality. All of your academics don’t have that a PC device and a reliable web service.
A survey conducted through the Ministry of Education in mid-April shows how well Japanese public schools have adapted. It found that only 5% of local governing bodies across the country were making plans online categories, while schools were closed due to the pandemic. , one hundred percent of them planned to examine a home with textbooks or published materials.
But now some people are calling for change. In the city of Musashino in greater Tokyo, parents petitioned the mayor to provide online learning for all public school students. They conducted a survey of 1,500 local parents and found that 96% of them supported online education. One of the survey’s organizers told NHK that the online classes will give students the chance to interact with their friends as well as pursuing their education.
Ishido Nanako, professor at Keio University’s Graduate School of Media Design, says Japan’s schools have never shown much enthusiasm for digital education, which means they were ill-prepared to adapt to the coronavirus crisis.
“People are too concerned about egalitarianism. This is one of the main reasons why we still stick to the traditional flavor of schooling in which academics sit passively in study rooms with pencils and notebooks,” he says. “This hasn’t replaced for more than a century, and Japan is lagging behind the rest of the global in terms of ICT (information and communication technology) in schooling. “
The OECD program data for the International Student Evaluation (PISA) 2018 illustrate how slowly Japan has brought ICT in education. They asked 15 -year -old academics how long they spent using virtual classroom classes a typical school week. In Japan, 89, 89 % said they never used them in mathematics classes, and 75. 9 % gave this response to science classes. However, the figures are the lowest of all the members of the OECD. Your task on a computer. The average for OECD members was 20%.
Ishido says national school closures have underlined the importance of ICT in both schools and homes. “We don’t need to widen the existing hole (in terms of online access), but at the same time, we will have to not take the Do Nothing technique. Instead, there deserve to be efforts to access new technologies. “
Ishido believes the pandemic will trigger the changes she’s been calling for.
The Japanese government began instituting reforms at the start of the pandemic, and the crisis accelerated those plans. The government now wants to distribute tablets or laptops to public and secondary school academics until next spring.
“Schools can reopen, but that doesn’t mean things will go back to the way they were,” Ishido says. “Something similar may happen again. It’s time to find tactics to build a new school formula or ‘blended learning’ that combines classical strategies with virtual learning, ultimately giving students more artistic opportunities. “
Instead of going back to passive in front of a blackboard, the pandemic is forcing us to reinvent how academics are taught in Japan.