HÀ NỘI — A public school in Hà Nội has moved into the 21^st century and is incorporating online applications into education.

Phan Huy Chú High School used to organise extracurricular activities like many other schools, with school staff proposing a few plans and then all teachers voting on them to decide which activities to run.

But things changed after the school subscribed to the Microsoft Office 365 services and gave all teachers and students accounts.

Nguyễn Thị Châu Loan, a young teacher in the school’s information technology support group, told the Tuổi Trẻ (Youth) newspaper that extracurricular activities could now be chosen via a survey on Microsoft Office 365.

“And it is just a simple tool for the school to reach a consensus in the most accurate and fastest way,” she said.

But the school board wanted to push it further to integrate online applications into day-to-day teaching and teacher-student interacting.

Teacher Trần Văn Huy, who monitors the school’s online system, said applications like OneNote could help students take notes in their lessons and share them among their classmates while teachers could use Teams to hand out homework.

“If a teacher wants to know how much homework of a particular subject the students must finish today, she can check it in Teams. This allows teachers to adjust their homework assignments so they won’t overload the students,” Huy said.

Teachers can also answer questions from students in the application, while parents can join the online groups to follow their children’s studies.

Phan Huy Chú High School has also turned to popular telecommunication software Skype to diversify student activities and sources of teaching materials.

Huy said students had connected with foreign students overseas for English exchange and attended a discussion with an academic expert via Skype.

The success of Phan Huy Chú High School in online schooling has spread fast in the capital. Huy and his team last month held two sessions to guide teachers and staff from 15 high schools in Mê Linh and Sóc Sơn districts on integrating online applications into conventional teaching.

These guiding sessions were not the first nor will be the last, Huy said.

Literature teacher Nguyễn Kim Anh, responsible for the online teaching curriculum, said she and the team were more than happy to share their experiences and ideas with colleagues in Hà Nội and beyond.

“There are some who don’t understand and think that we are wasting time on unpaid work,” she said.

“But it is truly amazing to see the good things we do being spread out.” — VNS