The emergence and rapid spread of the Coronavirus in the spring of 2020 has fundamentally changed our lives. The most important change has been the attempt to minimise face–to–face contacts everywhere in order to keep the epidemic under control. Public gatherings were banned, shopping malls were closed, and sporting events were also cancelled. As COVID–19 spread as easily among children as among adults, schools could not escape the restrictions. During the first wave of the epidemic, institutions had to switch to emergency remote education (ERE) at very short notice, which presented a number of problems for all participants. These problems and experiences of the switch should be collected at all levels of education, as they not only help to prepare for similar situations, but may also lead to conclusions that can be used to make the methods and solutions of classroom–based teaching more motivating, more effective or even more efficient. In this paper, we review both the challenges of the transition and the possible implications for the future teaching–learning process by reflecting on the lessons learned.
The increasing interest in introducing tablets into education as well as many countries’ education policies (see Digital Education Strategy) support the integration of the above-mentioned mobile devices (Mulet, van de Leemput & Amadieu, 2019). Accordingly, several governments are presently procuring or have already supplied a significant number of students with these devices (Tamim et al., 2015). Similar to most international large-scale initiatives, there are remarkable variances in tablet-supported education. The different school conditions (infrastructure, framework, human resources) result in the diversity of technological integration. In our research, in order to learn more about the infrastructural conditions at schools’ institutional levels, with online questionnaires we examined 145 primary schools using tablets in their education. We were looking to answer the following, questions: (1) what kind of infrastructural conditions are characteristic of the different institutions? (2) What kind of differences in infrastructural conditions are there between the schools in different settlements? To sum up the results, we can observe significant differences in the number of tablets, their hardware, accessories and software, along with differences in internet access and the regulation thereof.
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