Principal Cho Siu-man appreciates the efforts of different sectors in supporting underprivileged students with home learning during the pandemic. He says, “In the past two years, I have felt that there is love in the world. The Hong Kong Jockey Club, the business community and NGOs are all helping us from their respective positions.”
The prolonged pandemic has reshaped education, with students and teachers having to adapt to online learning. Tso Siu Man, principal at De La Salle Secondary School NT, said that in the past two years, teachers have had to overcome one teaching challenge after another.
Principal Tso recalls that when the first wave of COVID-19 infections hit, the suspension of face-to-face classes and the instant switch to online lessons left his school scrambling to adapt. “Most of our students come from low-income families. They don’t have their own computers,” Principal Tso said. “Luckily we had a few computers for students to use at home. Yet they brought them back almost immediately because they had used up the internet data at home after just two or three days. Although there were computers, we still could not conduct online lessons easily.”
Principal Tso said online lessons require a lot of internet data. To solve the problem, The Hong Kong Jockey Club worked with social welfare organisations and four telecommunication providers to launch the Bandwidth Support for E-learning at Home Scheme, supplying mobile data cards to about 100,000 students from low-income families, including students at De La Salle Secondary School NT.
Today, schools have the computers and other essential IT devices that they need. Meanwhile, teachers have accumulated a good deal of online teaching experience.
With school operations again affected in the latest wave of the pandemic, the Club has produced an additional round of the popular KeySteps@JC Wonder Boxes and Jockey Club START-up Resource Kits for kindergarten and primary one students respectively. These interactive items are designed to help children learn at home and enjoy parent-child time.
Learn more about KeySteps@JC.
Tammy Leung, Elderly Services Director at the Aberdeen Kai-fong Welfare Association, one of the participating organisations in the Jockey Club Digital Support Project for the Elderly, says, "We are talking not just about a mobile phone, but a device that can make the elderly feel cared for and allows them to connect with our community."