Online teaching tools are the future in education. As online learning is growing rapidly in number of students, online educational software becomes a great alternative to traditional teaching methods that caught on classical textbook-based learning. In addition, nowadays there are numerous free online tools that teachers can take advantage of. Even though they do not have fees, they prove to be so powerful and helpful in the classroom or at home. I can safely say that Internet has become the largest source of knowledge – it is easy to find information or get to skills right away by letting students learn from e-learning platforms by taking advantage of tools such as slide presentation , podcasting tool or screencasting software .
Technology has changed the way that we learn. Students have grown accustomed to learning online and teaching online online tools for science teachers is changing just how we teach. From blogs to wikis, there are so many different tools to entice students and inspire them to explore new concepts. Nowadays it is important for teachers to keep up with the latest trends in technology and use them to their advantage. This list of tech tools for teachers covers a variety of platforms that can be used in the classroom
Online Teaching Tech Tools for teachers can help to make their virtual classroom run more smoothly. While the adoption of distance learning is a revolutionary shift for students, families and administrators; for many teachers, the “online classroom” is a new landscape to explore. Compared to a traditional “brick-and-mortar” learning environment, there are new challenges which require a shift in teaching methods and tools.
Online Teaching Tech Tools is a compilation of online teaching tools for teachers free to choose from to make meeting modern day challenges as an educator much easier. These tech tools list provide a variety of options and are the best tech tools for teachers.
Buncee
Buncee understands how much more kids learn if they’re engaged, so their platform makes it easy to engage students from anywhere. Teachers have the flexibility to create activities that their class will enjoy with over 1000 templates, and students earn badges as they complete their work. Buncee also makes it easy for students to collaborate with sharing and discussion functionality.
Bakpax
Bakpax is an AI tool that autogrades student work, giving them (and the teacher) instant feedback on assignments! As teachers know, hand grading student work can take hours, so Bakpax allows teachers to save time with the more administrative aspects of teaching, so they can focus more on creative lessons/activities and individualizing student instruction.
Bakpax wants to support educators during the transition to remote learning, so teachers can currently access Bakpax for free!
Pear Deck
Pear Deck allows teachers to make lessons interactive so every student can actively participate, whether instruction is synchronous or asynchronous. It utilizes formative assessment, active learning, retrieval practice, and more to close the achievement gap, even for students who are learning from afar. Bonus: PearDeck has the stamp of approval from many Ozobot Certified Educators.
SeeSaw
Rather than limit students to one method for demonstrating their knowledge, SeeSaw allows students to show what they know with tools like draw+record, collage, video, and more. Educators report that SeeSaw is intuitive for students to use, so minimal support is required to use this tool!
Nearpod
Nearpod specializes in multimedia displays to make discussions more engaging. One of their top tools for teachers is Nearpod VR, an affordable virtual reality headset that lets teachers explore different concepts in 3D. There are more than 450 VR tutorials, broken down by subject and grade level. Take your students to explore volcanoes or for a historic look at the Taj Mahal. This technology inspires curiosity about the world and student engagement in lessons.
Learn Around The World
The goal of Learn Around the World is to use technology to connect students and educators globally. They have events and collaborative projects where students can work with people in different countries, and virtual field trips for exploring foreign lands. LATW also has guest speakers and private events that teachers can take advantage of. Imagine speaking with someone who lives in Buenos Aires while learning about Argentina. Your students can ask questions and use their curiosity to spur discussion.
dApp
EdApp’s new public microlearning courseware platform Educate All is free for teachers, students and anyone else on the planet who has a desire to learn. Together with UNITAR, EdApp is redefining what we mean by ‘team micro teaching’ by creating a true global village of educators.
EdApp’s authoring tool is an excellent way to effectively educate your learners with vital knowledge and skills. EdApp’s content library is populated with course topics ranging from addressing global challenges, leadership and entrepreneurship to hospitality and physical exercise. Powerful learner metrics are available for learner assessment, and EdApp’s Brain Boost spaced repetition feature is next to none. You can access EdApp’s mobile-based LMS for free!
Paymo
Paymo is a full-fledged project management software offered free of charge for Schools, Colleges & Universities. Paymo works well as a school management software thanks to its helpful features and multiple layers of access and user permissions.
The platform is excellent for all sorts of collaboration: student-teacher collaboration, peer collaboration, and even among staff members. For example, teachers (or professors) can organize classwork, plan projects of all kinds, and track their own time for proof of work. As ‘project managers,’ they can also supervise students’ logged hours (enrolled as ‘project members’).
When organizing coursework and assignments, teachers can easily set deadlines and milestones across the Calendar view, assign students to upload their work, and chat in real-time through comments or on the discussion board. All the information can be visualized in multiple ways, from mapping your to-do list (List & Table view) as sticky notes (Board view) or following the classwork progress one task at a time (Gantt view). And there’s a lot more to be explored in Paymo that helps you manage your classroom and projects.
Kahoot
As a teacher, I always had a stockpile of Kahoot! quizzes in my back pocket. I would use them as a form of face-to-face spaced repetition on a regular basis in order to refresh student understanding, and I would also have them on hand to pull out whenever I needed to inject a bit of competition and energy into the classroom. It is an awesome way to gamify learning and training through play. Word of warning though: students and adults alike LOVE Kahoot! so much they will literally beg for more!
Socrative
Socrative is a free teacher tool that allows educators to gather end-of-class/training feedback. Long before Socrative came along, I would get students to hand in paper ‘exit tickets’ as they left the classroom (usually brief 1-2 sentence responses on a specific question or a reflection on what they learnt). Exit tickets are a form of formative assessment that enables teachers to adapt the learning roadmap according to student understanding, and zoom in on particular hotspots. Socrative provides a digital version of ‘exit tickets’ along with a host of other gamified features such as the team-based Space Race quizzes.
Padlet
Padlet, effectively a digital pinboard, was another game-changer in my teaching methods. I used this free teacher tool in two ways; first, to create an anonymous question board where students pin up virtual sticky notes with questions that both the teacher and other students can respond to, and second, to save articles and web content that I have curated for particular topics. So much more engaging than your usual ‘required reading’ list!
GOOGLE CLASSROOM
If your school does not have an online learning management system (LMS), then I highly recommend Google Classroom to streamline your remote teaching. Google Classroom is intuitive and user-friendly, and it syncs with many of the websites and Chrome apps/extensions I mention below. Your school does not need to be “a Google school” for you to utilize Google Classroom with your students. All you need is a free Google account. Your students will need one too. With Google Classroom, you will be able to do the following (and lots more):
- Check students’ progress on ALL assignments
- See students’ work & writing (via Google docs/slides) in REAL TIME
- Send reminders to students who have not completed assignments
- Provide personalized feedback to students through comments
- Automatically grade Google form tests, quizzes, exit tickets, etc.
- Efficiently grade all other work submitted through Classroom
- Facilitate class discussions through the “Ask a question” feature (more info on that HERE)
I could write an entire post on utilizing Google Classroom, but then I wouldn’t have room for the other tools…so let me know if that is something you’d like to see and I can work on a separate post.
Types of Video Lessons
RECORDED LESSONS
One thing you will inevitably want to do is provide screen-recorded videos for your students. Whether you are lecturing on content or walking your students through directions for an assignment, there are multiple options for recording your screen (and even you, if you want students to see your face in the corner of the screen…totally optional though). My favorite tool for simple screen recording is Loom, a Chrome extension that saves your screen recording as a link (not a file that you have to save/upload anywhere). With Loom, you can see how many people have viewed your video, which gives you a good idea of how many students are doing their work.
Thankfully, Loom has removed all recording limits from its free version in the wake of the coronavirus, so you can record and post as much as your students need. Other free screen recording options include Screencastify (another Chrome extension) and Screencast-O-Matic (which you must download).
INTERACTIVE VIDEO LESSONS
If you find yourself wanting to do a little more than a screen recorded lesson, then you’ll be glad to know there’s an amazing free resource for creating interactive video assignments: EdPuzzle! With EdPuzzle, you can upload any video (from YouTube, your own screen recordings, etc.) and embed questions for students to answer as they watch. Once you assign a video, you can see who is watching it and answering the questions, so it makes accountability & grading easy. To learn how to create your own EdPuzzle, check out this thorough tutorial from my friend Jenna at Doc Cop Teaching. If you don’t have time to create your own, you can browse the many existing videos other teachers have uploaded to EdPuzzle.
Conclusion
Online teaching is getting immense popularity nowadays among the teacher community. This leads to lots of online teaching opportunities. Online teaching offers several benefits in comparison to traditional classroom teaching. One of the main advantages of online teaching is flexibility in the schedule. A number of tech tools are used for performing online teaching activities.
Every day, new technology is created that helps teachers in the classroom. These tech tools help students and teachers better communicate, organize data and engage students in lessons. Keep reading to learn about some of the best tech tools for online teaching.