In “Digital Practices and Applications in a Covid-19 Culture,” Christina Romero-Ivanova, Michael Shaughnessy, Laura Otto, Emily Taylo and Emma Watson review the challenges, stresses and difficulties in Covid-19 dilemma, especially for students and faculty.

Authors mainly discuss group work, pair work, the use of Zoom breakout rooms, and multimodal literary responses through technology applications such as Flipgrid and Google Docs during pandemic. For a lot of students and instructors, switching classes to online version by utilizing whatever technologies is not an easy thing; there is a procee of learning new software. On the other hand,  “21st century technologies have promoted differentiated ways of teaching and learning that are highly interactive.” Thanks to technology, such as Zoom, providing visual screens so as to foster and nurture face to face contract and interaction that similar to what happened in the classroom. In addition, making coursework “predictable, structured, and the need to establish a routine with clear concise expectations” help students learning. Personally, I am glad that a lot of my classes achieved this. However, authors also point out that some classes simply could not be adapted, such as music, dance, and labs. Some students that did not have adequate Wi-Fi need to find a solution as well.

Scholars from all over the world work together to attempt to “cope with the pandemic and continue to provide adequate support, instruction, and mentoring for their students”. In the aspect of emotion, some students encountered stress, financial, and emotional difficulties. Care and encouragement play important roles in this time. Students feel daunting and anxious in this environment and really concerned about their grades and GPAs. “Compassion, care, concern should be offered, and students should be welcomed back after a quite difficult time”.

Reflections from students in the article can be easily related to students who have the same experiences. I feel a strong connection about what they said about Zoom or Google Docs. However, sometime the zoom breakout rooms would also have awkward situations, such as nobody want to discuss, and I think that probably would not happen in real classroom.

Overall, the article connects to the current situation and provides a good discussion. It applied preliminary examination with a small sample size, so the outcome could not be described as representative.