By Sarah & Thao11L
As situations regarding COVID-19 took over the ability for schools to function, our students have been forced to adapt to the new online learning environment starting from 2019. Throughout the months, several programs have been added to many teachers’ lessons to provide a variety of teaching techniques. Some failed to meet standards as teachers lacked the ability to track their students’ progress, but some grew to heights and proved that it was worth the school’s investment.
One of the standout programs that has been adopted by many classes was “Education Perfect.” Education Perfect is an educational application from New Zealand that has gotten over 4000 schools, 1 million students and 60 countries. It was created by the founders due to their struggles in learning languages vocabulary and has been extended to many other subjects like Math, Science, English, Humanities, ... and offering lessons for different levels.
The system has been used by several schools before, such as BIS and ABCIS, and were evaluated as “successes”, it provides an informational and safe platform for students to study courses under their teacher’s monitoring. Furthermore, tests and assignments can be set by teachers to track student’s achievements and knowledge.
With the aim of bringing a high-quality learning platform, Education Perfect has been hosting friendly competition events with a variety of subjects for students from different schools and countries to join and compete. This is the first time our school has joined a language competition on Education Perfect, from the 26th to the 28th of October. All students have exactly 2 days to try their best and learn as much as they can within their selected language.
In our school, students from year 9, 10, and 11 entered Chinese, French and EAL subjects. By finishing lessons, answering questions, and doing quizzes to gain points. Together, all students’s cumulative points will be added to represent the school. Renaissance offered 220 students and it must be said that the competition was not totally fair as several schools had thousands of competitors; however, the aim of the game was to enjoy the experience and so no students were pressured to earn prizes or beat fellow competitors.
Our language students joined the competition very enthusiastically resulting in our school ranking 3rd in Vietnam. We also get some significant individuals that did extremely well: Leo from 9G was ranked the 5th globally in general and ranked 1st place globally in ESOL/EAL subject with James (9J), Annie (9J), Yolanda (10G) and Thao (11LL) ranked top 100 globally in Chinese.
“From this competition, and as a teacher, I feel really rewarding to know our students are so motivated and independent in learning. I also want to give the credit to my colleagues, as our students always give out their best, not only for this competition, but learning in general.” Mr. Darcy
“I was so excited that I could be a part of my school to compete with other students from other schools. I was nervous but at the end I did really well, and I will try even harder for the next competition.” Leo, our global 5th place participant.
Overall, the experience was highly enjoyable. Our achievements were more than anyone could’ve expected and the efforts some students were brought to light which brought a pleasant surprise to their teachers. We certainly believe that joining friendly competitions (especially online) gave students an opportunity to enjoy the learning journey as well as to find joy in their daily lives. The process was amusing yet competitive and fiery, which gave a refreshing escape for our students. Therefore, we hope that these competitions will happen more in the future.