A solution for education in times of crisis

I’d like to tell you about Soficreo, the educational division of Touch4IT. 

Our goal is to create software solutions that ease, simplify and accelerate education for both children and adults. Soficreo is a young division of our company – a team of people whose passion is to design and develop solutions that are efficient and beneficial not just on the technical, but mainly on the human level. In 2017, several members of our team have been awarded the Stevie? Award in the Customer Service Training Product of the Year category. 

In the past days, our country (as well as a significant part of the world) has entered the regime of physical distancing. We are separated and we connect digitally in different areas of our lives. The reason is twofold: the pandemic on one hand and the natural need to interconnect on the other. This is how we have evolved for the last 50 000 years: as social beings. The divide has brought several challenges, the most important of them probably being the necessity to maintain education and to adjust it in the pandemic as well as the post-pandemic period. 

We are visionaries, but when the circumstances call for it, we act. During the past week, we have reached out to several primary schools and are helping them to set up an online education regime. We have also reached out to the Soccer Academy in the town of Trnava, set up the first online hip-hop dance academy in Slovakia and tomorrow a private primary art school will launch its first online lessons. Together with almost 1000 students, sportsmen, sportswomen and coaches we are learning together how to transpose an offline school into online space. And not only that – we are discovering how to use what this crisis can teach us for a better future. 

Whether in the pandemic period or a normal regime, some children are absent from schools. Whether they are in hospitals, at home or traveling: they want to stay connected with their classmates. We have developed two digital tools that help us: the platform Teemea and the AR tool Klara.  

Teemea is used by teachers to create online lessons and courses, create virtual classrooms, give assignments to students and provide them with feedback. This is how most of the theoretical knowledge is being taught. The videoconferences via tools such as Zoom, Jitsi or Skype then provide a live interaction between teachers and students, where they experience discussion and exchange opinions. The recordings of some of these video calls later function as dynamic material that summarizes the key information. 

We are nearly ready to launch the experiential tool Klara – augmented reality brought directly to the homes of thousands of students. And now we are doing all of this pro bono because education is indeed our passion. 

During our activities, we have encountered one other challenge, possibly even greater than the identification and providing of online tools to teachers and students. The challenge is the management and organization of online education from the side of school directors and teachers so that it respects and preserves the natural biorhythm of children and their families in such a way as to ensure an optimal equilibrium and motivation of all parties. We have to find a way to organize the day so that the educational process is functional and enables children to further their knowledge. Great help for us is the know-how of several Anglo-Saxon schools based in Prague since they provide online education on the primary school level in the long term. A proposal of daily schedules, weekly and monthly programs is something that the directors and teachers of the approached schools have appreciated strongly. How to organize the morning? How many videoconferences, at what time, in what length and in what order? How to relate to siblings of different ages (and thus in different school-years) and their equipment at home? How to connect knowledge from two or three different classes into one interactive class via videoconference? How to use physical education classes for relaxing the children and providing them with some time-off? How to integrate parents into art education? We already have answers to most of these questions and we are testing the rest, but we have a lot more to discover. We are spending a lot of time online, but also live, tutoring teachers under strict hygienic measures. We are ready to share our knowledge including all the above-mentioned online tools, but also experience and know-how within the management of distance online education. Our experiences are not vast, but we are rigorously collecting them in the selected schools, to understand and react to real problems. It’s not easy and we also experience frustration and failure. However, we rather focus on all the acknowledgments and positive feedback that we get. 

In the beginning, it’s all about having a vision, but in the end it’s about the courage to accomplish it.