Home
Tools
Documents
Search
  • Pricing
  1. Home
  2. Blog
  3. The Education Blog
  4. Building a Resilient Classroom for Life After Covid
Blog-banner-Teachers-4000x960px

Building a Resilient Classroom for Life After Covid

by Jen

You can also read this article in German, Spanish, French and Italian.

Regardless of whether it’s a traditional or a remote classroom, what makes a classroom resilient?

In the advent of COVID-19, many education institutions frantically tried to find and implement emergency solutions to keep things moving. Regardless of whether individual schools were successful or not, one thing everyone learned is that moving forward, the classroom of today needs to be resilient. We can all agree it’s a grand word, but what is it really that makes for a resilient classroom?

Smallpdf recently interviewed a number of teachers across the United States to find out more about how they managed to make their way through remote and hybrid learning during a pandemic. We discovered not only what they were struggling with when it came to managing documents, but just how powerful a simple document can be when teachers need to bridge the gap between themselves and their students.

Will Remote Learning Be the “New Normal?”

pexels-julia-m-cameron-4144222

Image by Julia M Cameron on Pexels.

Granted, most schools are already back to some form of normal, if not entirely back to all in-person teaching and learning. However, the pandemic still sits deep in the bones of the education sector. Even if remote learning isn’t going to be the new standard around the world, we can say with confidence that we’ve learned quite a lot from this very unique and challenging experience. It’s also clear that some positive things have come from it:

  • Schools and teachers were stretched beyond measure, and they've made it work.
  • Schools now have experience in quickly adapting to new and unforeseen situations. They can quickly switch to remote learning from the traditional classroom. If this shift is required again in the future, they are now equipped to manage this transition even more effectively.
  • Schools and teachers are also now familiar with all the tools needed to support remote learning.
  • Software development for education has accelerated manifold, meaning there is a wide range of better-quality tools available to meet a wide variety of requirements.
  • Schools, teachers, and the wider community now have a fundamental appreciation for the technology involved and the ability to adapt to uncertainty.

Adapt, Survive, & Thrive

pexels-julia-m-cameron-4143791

Image by Julia M Cameron on Pexels.

In any setting, resilience is about having the capacity to bounce back from a difficult situation and carry on as usual, or even more effectively, despite the challenge. As teachers and schools have led the way to successful remote learning with the resources available to them, they've been an inspiring reminder that adapting is the first and most important step in building resilience.

Schools and teachers have faced innumerable challenges during the pandemic. When it comes to documents in particular, four challenges stood out for us as common among them all:

  • Educational resource management (mostly how to organize and manage teaching materials with PDF tools to split, merge, add page numbers, and make PDFs editable).
  • Document accessibility for students (how to make PDFs editable, so students can work on documents from the get-go).
  • Parent-teacher communication (mostly related to e-signing documents, sharing them, and then storing them).
  • School administration and coordination (to do with the internal workings of the school and how efficient document management enhances productivity).

Even though schools and teachers have been faced with these document challenges for the first time, they've tackled them head on and have shown us, yet again, how resourceful teachers can be. They've figured out what tools to use to merge and split PDFs, save and share PDF resources, make PDFs editable so their students can use them, make e-signing a breeze for parents, and manage whole school networks digitally.

It's this type of adaptability that has fostered environments where education, whatever it looks like, can continue and thrive. Whatever comes, education will be available. This is true resilience. This is the resilient classroom.

Did you enjoy this article? You can download our latest education e-book, From the Class To the Cloud: How Schools Can Leverage Digital Tools To Make the Move To Digital.

Jennifer Rees
Jen
UX Writer