Coping with Technology: Children's Experience with Learning from Home during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Technology, long feared to have a deleterious effect on children (and thus best avoided), has become a necessity for distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article explores how distance learning has been experienced and understood by children, many of whom had little prior knowledge of technology and had rarely applied it. At the same time, this study reveals how education has transformed as children have been compelled to use technology to continue learning. This article employs a qualitative-descriptive approach to analyze data collected through interviews, which were conducted remotely using Zoom and Google Meet. This article shows that the technology used for continued education during the pandemic has not simply caused problems for children, but also laid the necessary framework for replacing the teacher-centered model with a student-centered one. Further research is recommended, with a focus on comparing experiences at different schools and levels of education, as this would allow new directions for education policy in Indonesia to be explored.