Online teaching; a new experience for teachers

Teachers from the two schools in the nation’s capital (NCD) who contributed in developing content for the newly launched home-school website are grateful for the experience.

The website; The MyPNG Home Study was developed during the lockdown as an initiative by the Education Department. It was launched by the Education Minister Joseph Yopyyopy on April 23, in Port Moresby to allow students to access the national curriculum based materials during the lockdown.

There were 56 teachers who contributed their time and effort in gathering content to be shared online.

Carr Memorial Adventist primary and Marianville Secondary school were the only two schools who were part of the exercise.

Four teachers; three from the two schools; three from Marianville and one from Carr Memorial shared their experience and opinions on the online experience.

From the 34 from Marianville Secondary school three teachers spoke shared their experience of taking part in content development.

As a teacher, it was educational for me. Although it was stressful but it was satisfying at the end of the day because we knew we were contributing for a better purpose, which was to the students who were at home due to the lockdown.

– Anastasia Hasola, English Teacher

She added that one of the challenges they faced was the contextualising international materials to best fit Papua New Guinean contexts.

Robyna Lepon, another English teacher said:

It was a learning experience in a context that, we use text books; offline more often then the online resources. On the other hand, even though there were some negative comments on social media, it’s a generation of technology and we should start embracing the use of technology.

– Lepon

It was boring during the lockdown. But the department gave us something worthwhile to do and of great importance.

– Caroline Kala, Science Teacher

They thanked the school administration and the department for allowing them to take part in the exercise saying it will be an experience to remember; to be able to teach students during a nationwide lockdown.

Car Memorial had 22 teachers who contributed, one being a computing teacher Benjamin Jamurang said the department required them to gather materials on a given subject in three different formats; video, audio and PDF.

If we were to collect information about plants, we were required to get three PDF documents, video materials and audio materials on plants.

– Benjamin Jamurang

He said it was different from teachers’ normal ways of gathering information.

It was more relaxing because of the Internet service provided.

– Jamurang

Teachers are happy to contribute, some even used their own money to purchase data to download contents.

– School Principal Nida Bland

The contents were downloaded and collected by the department of education and then uploaded to the website.

Teachers do not do uploads, they are done by the Education Department, they; teachers only supply content according to the standard based curriculum that is being used in the schools nationwide.

Meanwhile, teachers have shifted their focus on preparing for the classes, thus contribution of learning materials has been limited for now.