For teachers, the order of the day is to maximize your efforts and time, while also making your efforts productive. A lot of teachers have been wondering how to master education technology. In the past decade, so many apps which are designed for enhancing education have been developed. The question today is how to choose the best educational apps that will benefit both students and teachers.
Here are the best free educational apps that will make you more productive.
Kaizena
Kaizena allows you to leave voice-recorded feedback on your student’s work. Students submit their work, and you can provide feedback using voice recordings and grade it right then and there. The creators of Kaizena claim that you can: “Review up to 75% faster than typing with Voice Comments”.
Some of the additional features are tools for easily embedding YouTube videos in your reviews. If you are struggling to keep up with reviewing your student’s homework, Kaizena could be useful.
Quizlet
Quizlet is a popular and easy-to-use online tool for creating flashcards. Quizlet has been around for a while, and you might be familiar with its most common features.
One of the biggest appeals of Quizlet is its vast library of content created by other users. If you want to create a set of flashcards for your students, chances are there’s already a set you can use.
Another great feature beneficial to tutors who are tutoring online is “Quizlet live.” According to their help center: “Quizlet Live in teams mode is an engaging game you can use to study or help students learn. Players work in teams to correctly match the terms and definitions from study sets.”
CommonCurriculum
ComminCurriculum offers a popular digital lesson planner and is not only designed for online tutoring. According to their website: “Cc’s flexible templates make adding standards, rearranging activities, and every other part of lesson planning efficient, powerful, and collaborative .” Some of the features of CommonCurriculum are:
Teachers can create a webpage that you can link to for displaying your lesson plans. Upload documents for all tutoring sessions. It shows a week at a glance and has lots of filters for what it shows.
Skooli
Skooli is a platform that allows students to find tutors for various subjects. If you’re looking to increase your client reach and land some more leads, Skooli might be a good place to start.
They provide a set of features for tutors, such as setting up your own schedule and profile, video calls, etc. You need to be pre-approved before being able to use Skooli. Like with any other tool for online teaching, you should prepare for a commission.
Quetext – plagiarism checker to ensure fairness
Let’s face it: how many of your students actually want to write their assignments? Wikipedia is a free source many of them still turn to when they need to put together an essay. But simply copying and pasting text from one place to another is largely detrimental to their creativity and even analytical skills.
Quetext is a tutoring app you can use to check for any plagiarism in your students work. The online tool tells you exactly which sections were copied and what their source is. Feel free to openly tell your students that you’re using this or similar software to keep them accountable for their own creation.
Storybird – online tutoring platform to teach students to write creatively
This online tutoring software teaches children and adolescents to write short stories and showcase their work online. Their website also offers lots of ideas for challenges you can have them undertake according to their age group.
You can develop diverse soft skills from the prewriting stage to debating and understanding multiple points of view for your teen students. The best part is that you can motivate your students to give their best as their projects will be displayed publicly where other users can read them and offer feedback.
VideoScribe – video explainers instead of whiteboard
We’re all sick of plain whiteboards. Even more so, your students. But everyone loves an entertaining video. To keep students hooked on the message and information you’re trying to get across, whiteboard videos are the fun and fast way to go.
VideoScribe lets you change up your teaching method every once in a while from kindergarten to the 12th grade and even higher ed students. One day you can have a stickman teaching the lesson, the next day a cat comes in to take over. Kids can also use this to create projects for their assignments and develop their video creation and editing skills simultaneously.
Formative – interactive quizzes you can track progress on
Formative is a digital education tool that allows teachers and tutors to create assignments either for individual students or entire classes. The question types you can opt for are diverse and can be riddled with fun supporting content like videos or images.
If you’re lacking out-of-the-box ideas, you can access a library of questions that have been previously used by other educators. The results for the tests are updated in real-time so you can add in your feedback along with emojis.
Artsy – for remote art class
Online art teaching class? Yes, you heard that right. Artsy is a go-to destination for all kinds of art-lovers as well as students and educators who want to learn more about art or become collectors.
Using this website is bound to turn your art classes into every student’s best part of the day, boosting their creativity and curiosity. This educational resource is free to use, providing articles and a collection for thousands of artworks students can review. Keep in mind it’s a better fit for ages 15+ and above due to the complexity of themes, genres, and fields you can teach.
Kahoot! – learning through gaming
Kahoot! provides a game-like learning experience. Kids can play pre-existing games or the ones you create together with their friends/colleagues via their phones. The online tutoring software can be used for kids of all ages from teaching them to read their first sentences to university lectures on medical science.
Through this digital education tool, learning is based on quizzes you can create with highly engaging videos and images. Students can answer these in real-time or study on their own. Scoreboards are displayed at the end to gamify the entire process and make it all seem entertainment instead of learning.
Edpuzzle – video lessons and screen sharing
Edpuzzle works in 2 different ways. For one, you can upload your own video and just add the questions you have at different points throughout its progress. Another common option is to search through an existing database of educational videos for various subjects including Maths, History, and Languages.
This online teaching tool saves you the time you’d need to put together a similar video while also allowing you to add in a quiz for every video. A perfect way to ensure your students understood the lesson and have actionable knowledge to work with.
ThingLink – no more meaningless images and videos
This online teaching tool provides a one-of-a-kind learning experience. For your regular teaching process, you’d probably just show students an image and talk about it. ThingLink lets you turn any image or video into an interactive experience.
Let’s say you have a class on bird species. Kids won’t just see the bird. They’ll be able to click on actionable points throughout the image to learn about its habitat, characteristics, and even sounds.
ClassTag – online tutoring software for communicating with parents
Whether you’re teaching an entire class or have just a couple of students, parent-teacher communication is part of your daily routine. ClassTag is an online tutoring software that lets you create a virtual class community. Make announcements, create events, and praise your students from one common place without having to call in a separate meeting. You can even send parent conference invites and reminders.
Krisp – keep distracting background noises at bay
Noise is one of the #1 causes for distractions during an online class. Not to mention that students are not always able to fully understand what the teacher is saying. Microphones buzzing, families talking around, dogs barking, and younger siblings barging in when the teacher is sharing something important.
To mute your or your students’ background noises, Krisp is a noise cancelling tool that works with any conferencing app you might be using including Zoom, Slack, and Google Hangouts. The app is easy to install on all devices and works with any headset, microphone, or speaker. No more worrying about your students not hearing you or having to repeat yourself over and over again.https://krisp.ai/demo-iframeGet Krisp for Free
WeVideo – an online video editor that won’t crash your student’s computer
WeVideo is an online video editor tool commonly used by schools. Education providers have turned to this option since it works on Chromebooks too which is what most students use regularly at school.
Kids use it to create fun videos for their assignments from thematic slideshows instead of boring presentations to developing their public speaking skills. For this, this software for tutoring offers a green screen option you can also use to send instructional videos. In addition to not requiring a performant device, the tool is also very simple to use, with lots of resources to choose from in the app.
Conclusion
As long as online learning is still considered a viable option, then apps for teachers will always be needed. However, it’s also true that not all apps are created equal. Not all of them are going to be the best free educational apps for teachers. But you can tell a lot about a particular application by looking at who produces it and who it’s geared towards.