There are a lot of platforms available in the market which you can choose from to get started with teaching online. However, most of these platforms work on a payment basis, and only pay the teachers after a number of hours were put in by them.
With so many people looking for viable options, we have compiled a list of the best free online teaching platforms for teachers to help out.
Storybird
Storybird aims to promote writing and reading skills in students through storytelling. In this tool, teachers can create interactive and artistic books online through a simple and easy to use interface. The stories created can be embedded in blogs, sent by email, and printed, among other options. In Storybird, teachers can also create projects with students, give constant feedback, and organize classes and grades.
Animoto
Animoto is a digital tool that allows you to create high-quality videos in a short time and from any mobile device, inspiring students and helping improve academic lessons. The Animoto interface is friendly and practical, allowing teachers to create audiovisual content that adapts to educational needs.
Kahoot!
Kahoot! is an educational platform that is based on games and questions. Through this tool, teachers can create questionnaires, discussions, or surveys that complement academic lessons. The material is projected in the classroom and questions are answered by students while playing and learning at the same time. Kahoot! promotes game-based learning, which increases student engagement and creates a dynamic, social, and fun educational environment.
Dewo – for outsourcing meeting scheduling
Everyone wants to cut down on all the pointless small admin and organizational tasks that clog up your day—and meeting scheduling is a prime candidate. Thankfully, Dewo can take the whole slog off your hands, managing all coordination back-and-forth for you. With a combination of calendar data, timing preferences and AI, it suggests optional meeting times which maximize the availability of focused time for all meeting participants.
Price: gloriously free.
Todoist – For organizing your tasks
If you’re looking for a digital to-do list that’s a cut above Notes, check out Todoist. Aside from mapping out all your work in one organized space, it helps you prioritize tasks and keep your most important upcoming tasks in focus. With integrations for a ton of staple digital collaboration tools – including Dropbox and Google Calendar – it acts as an organizational hub for getting things done.
Price: free for 5 people working on up to 80 projects. Upgrade for $3/month for their Premium plan.
Pocket – for curating useful web resources
Ditch your bloated bookmarks bar for this handy app, which lets you save web content to one clean repository. It’s provides an easy way to save all the interesting articles you encounter for later, and also lets you create shared resource lists for colleagues and students.
Price: free, with the option to upgrade for $5/month for Premium.
📱 Virtual collaboration and teaching aids
Best apps for designing and creating content
As teachers, we are always needing to create things for our students and it can be difficult to find free tools that let us create quality content to use in our classrooms.
Look no further than Canva and Google Slides to make great resources for our classrooms.
Canva
Canva is amazing! It is a free tool, although there are premium features you can pay for that lets you create just about anything for your classroom.
You can create and design all types of content within Canva using their free account that looks professional and can be used with your students in your virtual classroom, or brick-and-mortar classroom.
Think of Canva as your easy-to-use plug-and-play design assistant.
Do you need a presentation? Do you need a cover slide for something?
Let’s look at how teachers can use Canva as a free tool to create lessons for their students.
Canva lets teachers create:
- Worksheets
- Lesson plans
- Presentations
- Posters
- Virtual backgrounds (for Zoom, etc.)
- Documents
- Teaching resume
- Infographics
…and so much more!
Look no further than Canva for your go-to tool to design just about anything you need.
Google Slides
Google Slides, while more limiting than Canva, is another easy-to-use, free tool for teachers to use to make lessons, presentations and content for their classroom.
Part of the Google Suite of apps, Google Slides acts as your web-based presentation tool similar to applications like PowerPoint or Keynote.
With a free Google account, you have access to Google Slides and can create unlimited presentations to use in your classroom.
Simply go to Google Drive and make a new Google Slide presentation. You can choose from their pre-made templates or make your own.
Once you have made your presentation template you can add:
- Images
- Text
- Audio
- Video
- Shapes
- Tables
- Charts
- Diagrams
You can customize color, font and all the normal features of a presentation program.
Since it is part of the suite of Google Apps, you can have students create their own presentations collaboratively or individually.
Google slides can also be shared with others with ease of use or you can download them as PDF files.
Loom – for making quick video explainers and demos
Billed as “video messaging for work”, Loom is a great tool for creating quick screencast videos – either with or without audio. It’s ideal for providing tutorials and demos, like showing a group of people how to set up or use a new piece of software. Just start recording your screen and get a shareable link to your video once you’ve stopped.
Price: the basic version is completely free. Upgrade for $5/month for advanced recording and editing features.
Prezi – for professional digital presentations
Prezi lends instant design credibility to department and classroom presentations. It offers motion, zoom and spatial relationships for those with the budget looking for something more engaging than PowerPoint, Keynote or Slides. A range of professionally-designed templates do the artistic legwork for you, so you only have to focus on adding your content.
Price: subscriptions start at $9/month. Upgrade for $24/month for offline access, PDF export and premium images.
Dropbox Paper – for document collaboration
If you need a remote-friendly word processor tool, look no further. Dropbox Paper provides one clean space for creating, sharing and editing work with others in real-time. It’s a particularly good choice for student assessment, allowing you to add comments throughout a document. You don’t need a Dropbox subscription to use it either – for now, at least, it’s completely free. Its Slack integration is a nice bonus if you’re looking to keep your communications neatly tied together.
Price: completely free.
WeTransfer – for sharing large files
Need to send someone a file that’s too big for an email attachment? Provided it’s smaller than 2 GB, you can send it via this free browser tool. If you’d rather build a common file repository for staff or students, check out Dropbox (or Google Drive File Stream for a less user-friendly, but free solution). Shared folders let everyone quickly share and access important documents, templates, frameworks and assets.
Price: free for sending files up to 2 GB. Upgrade for $12/month to send up to 20 GB and enjoy 1 TB of storage.
Idroo – for virtual whiteboards and live annotation
Virtual whiteboards are a no-brainer if you teach using equations or diagrams, but they also help to make all types of virtual collaboration easier and more dynamic. In addition to plain boards, Idroo lets you paste powerpoint presentations, PDFs and Word documents for live annotation. You just need to set up a web account to get started.
Price: get 5 plain boards and 50MB of storage for free. Upgrade for $10/month if you need document annotation.
Markup Hero – for quick image annotation
While mainly aimed at creative industries, Markup Hero is a useful for taking screenshots and annotating images. You can easily to share links to your images and save annotations for future editing. Being completely free, it’s an ideal choice for providing feedback on assignments, presentations or offline documents.
Online Whiteboards
You missed your whiteboards when you are not present in your classrooms. Isn’t it true? They are handy as everyone can easily see them, and even you can write and draw anything and then erase it in a second.
The concept of using a physical whiteboard goes away when you are teaching in an online classroom, but the need for a whiteboard never ends.
Digital whiteboards are the substitutes for physical whiteboards in online classrooms. They replicate the experience of a physical whiteboard for teachers as well as students. These digital whiteboards offer shape libraries and premade templates that can be used to create content (visuals, charts, posters, diagrams, etc.). They also make it easier for anyone to access the online content created from their devices.
Some of the online whiteboards also offer built-in video conferencing and real-time collaboration features. It helps both the teachers and students to work together and track the changes made by each other. Same as in a real classroom where everyone communicates around a whiteboard (or a blackboard), an online whiteboard also makes it possible to do so by-
- Making your online teachings more interactive
- Writing, visualizing and drawing the theories online as you explain them to the students
- Allowing your students to participate actively
- Making presentations, posters, and other learning material for the online classroom
If you are already familiar with the online whiteboards, you must also know the steps that need to be followed. However, the ones who newly started their online classrooms didn’t know anything about it. So here are some much-needed steps to be followed to study through Online/Virtual Whiteboard.
Conclusion
When you think of online teaching platforms, the first ones that come to mind are probably Edmodo and Kahoot. Both teach 21st Century skills, short for PBL or Problem Based Learning which is a method of learning where students take on challenges in a learning environment. These learning environments include problem solving and creativity. PBL provides a variety of activities in each topic, rather than disjointed facts in a curriculum.