The Importance of Virtual Technologies in Education

Abstract

Students with their school bags are walking, smiling, and moving forward with the goal to reach the school. They enter school, sit on their chairs waiting for their teacher, who enters with books in his hands ready for the class to begin. These scenes seem from a long time ago, especially in the schools of North Macedonia where we live. The pandemic that the world is facing from 2020 has changed the way how we learn and educate our students. Distance learning has become the main way of teaching and learning, thus making us question our school methodologies and the way we provide and acquire knowledge. Digital platforms have become the new way teachers and students communicate. It is important to mention that there are schools that use a combination of physical and digital learning, but the important issue here is that schools may be going through a very important change, which will certainly be affected from how long the pandemic will last, but which will leave its mark even long after it ends. These are the aspects that this paper we deal in providing information about different platforms and how each one of them has affected the learning and teaching process, whether it is in our region or in the world as a whole. Things, of course, haven't been so smooth, because it seems that the world wasn't prepared for such a drastic change in this field, therefore education systems had to face many hurdles in order to find a middle ground to make the transition as successful as possible. Some countries have had better results, some not so much, but one thing is for certain, Tech companies have given us a large number of alternatives of which some may have suited best in one school, while some in another. Regarding this important transition, schools have faced technical and training problems, where some have lacked any proper knowledge about the digital platforms that exist for this purpose, while others in addition to that, have lacked adequate computer devices to make an effective teaching/learning process. We will try to explain why parts of the world weren't properly prepared for times like these and if there is some hope that there is a brighter future for the educational systems to provide the needed learning quality for the generations to come. But he most important thing is whether we as human beings who are in constant need for knowledge, are learning a lesson from these hard times and are preparing ourselves for possible similar times like these in the future. In one way we need to reflect on what went wrong and, at the same time, make important steps to improve tomorrow.