Given the country’s current circumstances, teachers are working tirelessly and passing on educational material to parents in order for them to home-school their children.

Amid the coronavirus outbreak, Malta had to shut down all schools including primary, secondary, post-secondary and tertiary institutions after the ninth case of the coronavirus was confirmed, in order to avoid the virus from spreading. In light of this situation, Students have to work from home.

The Director General for Curriculum, Lifelong Learning and Employability Stephen Cachia said that they “have set up a Working Group which is comprised of representatives from all the three sectors: State, Church and Independent Schools, together with the Malta Union of Teacher (MUT) in order to find and provide students with the best method of online teaching.”

He added that “they have come up with initiatives which will support schools in providing good quality education to their students.”

Cachia said that “they have a website – www.curriculum.gov.mt – which is a repository for educational resources for teachers, students and parents. He added that “material is already being put up on the website, however they are also inviting teachers to send any material for it to be published and available for everyone.”

“We are encouraging teachers to use online methods to directly communicate with the students of their class or classes,” he said.

“For those educators who seek more support, they can either seek it through their respective schools or through the Digital Literary Centre which is offering further information through a helpline, and through a dedicated website - https://digitalliteracy.skola.edu.mt/-  on how to use online platforms such as MySchool.  

“In the case of state schools, educators can make use of any platform or method that is convenient for them and their students, such as Ilearn/Fronter and ClassConnect for tablets. Another platform is MySchool which is the official government portal that was initially introduced for attendance and reporting, however due to the current situation this portal is also being used to directly provide students with educational material,” he said.

“Eventually the Working Group will have a number of meetings to determine what needs to be done in order to improve the situation,” Cachia said.

A number of UoM academics have already started delivering their material via the online tools available. Others have also started online lectures through Zoom or Google Meets in order to ensure that students go through the teaching and learning process.

Despite the situation being very new, St. Joseph’s School in Blata L-Bajda is using the system known as MySchool, which is a school system where work is uploaded by teachers for their students related to what they were doing in class last week.

The head of school, Roberta Mifsud Bonnici, told the Malta Independent that this system involves all students having their own email address, which can be both accessed by children and their parents/guardians. With such means, the school will be able to carry out teaching from home, however this is all relatively new to everyone and thus they are still experimenting and evaluating the whole learning process.

At the moment, teachers are uploading work for the students, giving them an explanation of the assigned tasks and explaining how to successfully complete them. Once the assigned work is complete, the majority of teachers in the school will then provide feedback to the students.

Mifsud Bonnici said: “If a student was assigned a creative writing task, the student would complete the task, send it through the MySchool system, and the teacher would correct it and send feedback to the students online.”

Mifsud Bonnici also added that “all teachers need to inform the school about everything they are doing. For instance, if teachers decide to give online lessons to students, as the head of school, she will be a participant aswell in order to monitor everything that is going on.”

“If students have any questions or queries regarding the assigned tasks they can communicate with their teachers through our MySchool system”, Mifsud Bonnici said.

“Our Learning Teaching Assistants are also kept in the loop with everything that is going on. Our LSE’s will be able to do the adaptions needed for these students,” Mifsud Bonnici said.

Bernie Mizzi, the director of Chiswick House School and St. Martin’s College said that they have put together a system that reaches out to every single student and family in terms of how they are going to work, given that students and staff members are out of school for two weeks.”

”We have our own systems and everybody is very clear about what they should be doing on an individual basis at home,” she said.

“Due to the fact that this is relatively new to all of us, there is still much to do as we have to evaluate the impact of this whole situation with regards to the curriculum and the quality of the learning itself. These are the big challenges ahead, however we are very confident that as a National working group, working as three sectors together with the Malta Union of Teachers (MUT), we will get through this, as each and every staff member works tirelessly in order to give their students the best education possible,” she said.

“Over the years, we made use of other platforms and applications in order to communicate and provide work for children who might have been sick on a particular day,” Mizzi said. However, this situation is on a much larger scale and thus “there are still a few issues that need to be tackled, and will be resolved in the coming days.”

Mizzi said that “the system we have adopted for this learning from home process is very much based on individual decisions by teachers to determine what is best for their students. This ultimately will also depend very much on the task assigned to the students. Due to the fact that this is all very new to everybody these things are still being thoroughly evaluated at the moment.”

She added that as a school they “seek to work with every staff member in order for them to be able to work comfortably with their own chosen methods, as some teachers adapt more to these platforms than others.” Therefore, the work that is assigned to children is carried out in different ways.

“Teachers within the schools work individually and collectively in teams to give a comprehensive experience to kids,” she said.

“Over the next few days we will be paying close attention on testing the system and the approaches we are using, and most importantly with every hour we are evaluating how it is being received,” Mizzi added.

“Eventually, parents and children will be asked to evaluate the quality, and how they are receiving and perceiving it,” she said.