Online teaching tools are useful to the teacher and students at the same time. A teacher can easily show the lessons to their student and make it more interactive with online tools. For a student, he/she can practice with these tools whenever they get time. These tools are available at an affordable price and many tools provide discount coupons as well.
Have you been struggling lately to find jobs and teach online? Are you frustrated teaching online and looking for other options. If yes, then here is the solution to that. The very first thing is to teach online you need tools for it. With online tools you can easily teach your students with same ease and comfort. These tools are specially designed for teachers to give them proper guidance about how to teach online so if you are looking for best tools for teachers, then must check out this article.
Diigo
Diigo is a social bookmarking with excellent organization tools. The main value of Diigo is how it increases both students and teacher productivity while making it fun. Teachers can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks and access to premium functionalities for free (apply here).
You can create your personal library in the cloud for each of your courses, with links, pages, notes, pictures, and invite students so that they can access it and annotate. Students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can start using all the benefits that a Diigo group provides, such as group bookmarks and annotations, and group forums. Students can then collaborate and all read the same article and discuss synchronously right on the page.
You can also provide feedback to students’ work and writings by posting sticky notes and making screen captures and marking it up. Diigo provides powerful search capabilities.
You can find anything easily, even your own annotations. Diigo also provides excellent organization capabilities, with both tagging and lists, to suit different needs.
Evernote
Evernote is one of my favorite apps for learning. Is one powerful tool. Evernote is a note-taking app that can do much more than just taking notes. Like diigo, Evernote lets you save any content, forever. With Evernote you can do almost everything you want, is like a second brain. From a simple checklist to writing business plans, from class note-taking to academic research, from organizing your ideas to organizing your team.
Evernote is compatible with all kinds of devices and operating systems, and it is accessible also through the web app. You can share with your students complete notebooks, composed of unique resources, and organize it with tags. Guests are allowed to annotate and collaborate if you give them permission, or just read if you restrict it.
Evernote has a free version that’s quite complete for students. But the premium version is accessible and gives you the power to add notes to pdf files, do a text search on all your content, save and access revision history of your notes, send yourself emails with notes and integrate other apps like google drive.
Notion
Notion started as a collaborative document editor. But you can do many other things. Students can use it to take and share notes in class or to organize their tasks with to-do lists.
But as an educator Notion can be the perfect workspace for your syllabi, notes, assignments, grades, and much more. You can create your course syllabi and share it with your students or create a wiki for the class.
Notion offers built-in templates that make student and teachers’ life easier. Students can find tools for building grade calculators, personal budget, job applications. While teachers can adopt ready-to-use templates for lesson plans, schedules, and class directory.
Notion is free for both students and educators. With an official institutional email address, you get access to unlimited block storage and no file upload limit.
Hypothes.is
Hypothes.is is not like any other annotation tool. If I have to be honest, is one of my favorites. Not only it’s a remarkable tool, but it is also open-source and completely free. Hypothes.is goes beyond traditional digital annotation, they enable sentence-level note-taking or discussion on classroom reading, news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation, and more. The beautiful about it is that it promotes web literacy and digital citizenship in students, more than any other app.
Educators need to create an account and then send the registration link to their students. Students will then be able to access the readings assignments and start annotating. You can also create private annotation groups. So, for example, if you want your students to work in smaller groups, you can send them special links. This link will also serve as the group home page with a list of members and texts annotated by the group. You can also link to a stream of annotations created by group members from the group home page.
Hypothes.is has a Chrome browser extension and is compatible with almost all Learning Management Systems (Canva, and Moodle included). For a quick guide on how to use it in your classroom, go here.
Visual collaboration and communication tools are also a brilliant way to make your online classes more dynamic and to motivate your students to be more active. There are several apps for doing this, but Mural and Miro are my favorite.
Mural
A digital workspace for visual collaboration. As an educator, you can apply for a free facilitator account and start collaborating with other educators and students. With the educator account, you can have up to 10 team members (which can edit, facilitate and create murals) and 20 guests (only for collaborating to murals you give them access to) to your mural spaces. With Mural you can conduct virtual brain-storming sessions, use canvas layouts and frameworks designed by experts for different activities (business model, mind-mapping, empathy map, many others). you can break out your classroom in groups so that students’ teams can collaborate in different workspaces. You can apply for a Mural educator account here. Here you can find a tutorial on how to use Mural for education.
Miro
Similar to Mural, Miro is an app that acts as a virtual whiteboard for team collaboration. Educators and students can apply for a free education account that has the same functionalities as the pro version. Even if you don’t apply for the education account, you can create your free account and have up to 3 whiteboards to play with. You can invite an unlimited number of viewers and have small teams collaborating in your whiteboards. Otherwise, with the educational plan, you can invite and collaborate with as many students as you want and create unlimited whiteboards. To apply for an education account, you just need to apply here.
Class Dojo
When our students feel like they belong, they are engaged in learning. To create a community online, Class Dojo is the best tool. There are so many features we love, like the morning meet app, think/pair/share app, the class storyboard that you can fill with posts and videos and share with parents, and the positive points you can give students.
Factile
I don’t know a student who doesn’t love playing Jeopardy. It’s so much more fun than flipping through flashcards or completing a study guide on paper. This tool is so quick and easy to use. You can create a Jeopardy-style quiz board in just a few minutes.
Kahoot
The most famous interactive quiz platform is Kahoot, a free student-response that uses many gamification techniques to engage students’ participation and enhance learning. With Kahoot, you can both host live quizzes and self-paced challenges for out-of-class review. You can play Kahoot games in single mode or in team mode and offer plenty of fun features to stimulate students to play and learn. Kahoot offers a basic free plan where you can invite up to 50 players, host online games, play, and create as many Kahoots as you want and have assessments of reports ready to download. Premium plans start at 5 USD per month and you get more amazing features and more players.
Sli.do
With sli.do you can empower your students to ask questions, vote in polls, and be a part of the lecture by using a simple Q&A and polling tool. Sli.do is a great tool for promoting active learning in online classes. It allows you to involve your students in your lecture and give them the freedom to express their opinion via live polls, quizzes, brainstorming. The possibilities are vast.
- With polls, you can learn if your lecture’s content resonates with your students. You can also use them to drive meaningful discussions in your class.
- Use quizzes to find out how much your students remember from your lectures. Use them to recap the content from the last lecture. Or motivate your students to pay attention during your lecture by hosting a quiz at the end.
- Use the questions feature to collect students’ questions throughout your lecture and address them as they come in or in a dedicated Q&A session at the end of your class. You and your students can upvote and provide their answers in real-time, making peer-learning possible.
Another awesome feature is the switcher app. With Slido Switcher, you can display polls or questions on top of your presentation using your smartphone as a remote control. Whether you use PowerPoint, Keynote, or Prezi, our Switcher app allows you to switch seamlessly between your presentation and Slido.
Sli.do offers an education package starting at $5 per month. But you can also use the free version for free for up to 100 participants.
Wakelet
A free platform that allows you to curate and organize content from different platforms to save and share with students, colleagues, and friends. You need to create a collection — something like hashtags topics on Instagram — and students can contribute to adding text, pdf, videos, URLs, images, and Flipgrid shorts. These are brilliant ways for students to express their learning. Apart from this, the teacher can encourage creativity among the learners by inviting students to approach the assessment the way they want to. The idea behind Wakelet is to curate content like you will do for blogs (like Medium) or magazines. You can synthesize a bunch of different content, filter out the noise, and keep what is valuable in one sole collection to better communicate about a specific concept or topic. Wakalet is completely free and its potential is amazing.
Conclusion:
There are lots of online tools to help you do your job better, whether that is a teacher or a writer. An online teaching tool can be anything from a simple grammar checker to more complex tools that can measure online engagement.