During this outbreak of the Epidemic, all in person meetups have been deferred. To overcome this all schools, conduct their meetings online. Like any other school in China, Keystone Academy conducts its staff online meeting every day using Microsoft Teams and introduces various activities for its attendees. A contest by the name #BeatTheVirus, DemoSlam was organized and conducted to make the staff meetings more interesting. The contest was publicized on social media and invited participants from all over the world. The participants presented their ideas to facilitate remote learning of the students during the current situation of Coronavirus outbreak that the whole world is facing.
On February 27th 2020, the contest’s round 2 was conducted. A total of four participants presented their ideas to the attendees. Each participant was given five minutes time to present their ideas and five extra minutes were allotted for the translator to translate their ideas into Chinese. Ralph Emmerink, a Dutch working for a school in Xiamen presented on the importance of Peergrade and FLOOP. Tina Peji, A Filipino working in India, demonstrated the advantages of using her application, the CLIPS. Stephanie Rothstein, a Californian based educationist, provided some examples and tips of using Flipgrid. The last of the participant was Hamza Khan who participated on behalf of his school, Beijing International Bilingual Academy (BIBA). He presented his ideas as well as translated them into Chinese for the audience, as he is bilingual and is fluent in both English and Chinese. Hamza Khan is working with BIBA as Educational Technology and Systems Coordinator and has been living in Beijing for the last nine years.
All the participants presented some very amazing and interesting ideas to help virtual learning to cope up with the challenges posed by the current Coronavirus situation. The judges were the audience who were provided with an online link to vote for the candidate, they deem suitable to win. Hamza Khan representing BIBA, came out to be the winner after a close competition as the audience was very impressed with his ideas. His ideas were different from other participants as they presented on the use of a particular application, website or strategy, while Hamza’s ideas consisted of the use of an application, a strategy, and an approach altogether to help students learn virtually.
Hamza’s presentation consisted of three segments; the first segment was about an application called “Microsoft Math Solver” that helps students with solving mathematical equations, the second part constituted “Interactive Learning” which is an interesting approach to remote learning, and the third and the final part was related to developing a “Student Geek Club” that by assigning a representative to a class, helps students deal with their issues at home.
Microsoft Math Solver is a newly introduced application that has a user-friendly interface. The initial part of the presentation was started with an introductory video that showed the application’s interface and its features along with explaining its use and practicality. The presentation emphasized three important built-in tools of the application by briefly explaining their use and significance. Starting up with the tool of “Scan and take a Picture”, Hamza explained how easy and simple it is to scan a mathematical equation from a piece of paper by using this application. The application then proceeds to stepwise solving the mathematical equation by explaining each step and eventually presents the answer. This helps students with getting the answers to their mathematical problems as well as understanding each calculation step. Moving on to the second tool called “Write with the hand”, the BIBA’s representative demonstrated how to write a mathematical equation with one’s handwriting that the application recognizes and solves it. Other already available solving applications don’t recognize handwritten equations at times and ask to put in the equation again. Also, these applications don’t calculate if the writing is in more than one line. Microsoft Math Solver, on the other hand, has advanced features the enable it to recognize the handwriting and also solve the equation even if it is written in more than one line. The last tool was “Built-in scientific calculator” which with visual aids, was construed as how to compute advanced mathematical equations. This tool also provides explanations for each calculation step. Hamza illustrated how important can this tool be in the current scenario where students are not carrying their calculators with them due to the risk of infection.
The speaker also explained the importance of this application for teachers who can create questions for students using this application, make worksheets, and print and share them. When teachers are away as is the case in the current situation of the virus outbreak, the application becomes immensely useful as it explains each calculation step. Another advantage is that it keeps the history of computations in which students can go back and review at any time while solving complex mathematical equations. They can choose to remove the history and also bookmark some calculations for future use. Hamza explained how the app can be useful in bilingual schools such as his, as it comes with more than twenty built-in languages, where one can use for instance English to solve an equation and then change the language to Chinese to show and explain the steps to students.
He then proceeded to the second segment of his presentation where he shed light on an interesting approach that has been implemented in BIBA, the “Interactive Learning”. The approach is useful for music and art class in particular, where teachers are facing the difficulty of not having access to musical instruments or do artwork because the cities are lockdown due to the virus outbreak. Interaction between students and teachers is an important aspect of arts and music classes. An example was given where a teacher who had access to sculptures, helped his students by showing them around using a video call and even played the piano for them.
The third segment of the presentation was about the “Student geek club tech support”, that has been operational in BIBA since July 2019. In the current scenario, student to teacher contact is difficult but student to student contact is very easy as they have many ways to communicate. The presenter demonstrated how it is implemented by picking one representative from each class who can help his fellow students with resetting of passwords, software installation, and support. The ease of having a standard password was analyzed as the representatives don’t need to remind students of the passwords after changing it every time. Some screenshots of group conversations were shown as examples where students reported the kind of problems they were having and the quick responses they got.
The audience found the ideas interesting and useful to beat the virus. The presented ideas were also adaptable, that led to Hamza getting the highest number of votes to win the #BeatTheVirus DemoSlam contest.
