Online Teaching Japan: Teachers helping teachers through the pandemic

The Spring of 2020 will, among educators worldwide, be forever associated with incredible
challenges that some might call creative, some might call traumatic. Teachers everywhere
were scrambling to find answers to questions they didn't even know how to ask concerning
what was called an Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) environment. It was then that many of
us found some answers, new knowledge, and a new way community for sharing that
knowledge in Online Teaching Japan (OTJ), a Facebook private group that brought teachers
from all around the world to inquire, share, and commiserate over all the bumps in the road
that teaching in the pandemic would bring.
And now that we are emerging out from under the pandemic how should we see our experience?
Was it just an emergency that we put behind us and return to “normal” or do we look at it as an
opportunity to push ourselves further ahead in what we can do to improve our classrooms?
José Domingo Cruz was close to the centre of the phenomenon that was OTJ. He became
known as a ZOOM expert early on and helped provide weekly information sessions to get
teachers ready to use unfamiliar tools like video conferencing software, learning management
systems, and digital education suites. In this presentation, he will talk about OTJ’s role in
helping teachers through the pandemic and discuss and consider what its future role might be.