How should teachers change their approach to teaching in a world where there has been a power shift from the teacher to the student? As students, we were forced to learn from what our teachers wanted us to. In the world of free educational platforms, students have access to an unprecedented level of freedom and learning opportunities. The learning landscape is being overhauled. It’s being flattened out. Teaching is one of the most rewarding jobs in the world, but it has many challenges attached. This is why the need for effective pedagogy is more important than ever before. A teacher can do control over everything they expect their students to learn. This means that the teacher needs to make sure they are prepared for everything they want their students to learn in order to deliver quality knowledge in an effective manner.
1. Edmodo
Edmodo is an online teaching platform with an interface that resembles Facebook. Students can join class pages with a code distributed by the teacher. Within these pages, teachers can post updates, polls, worksheets, and other assignments for students. Since Edmodo is purely for educational purposes, students will not be distracted by irrelevant content while perusing the content on Edmodo.
To facilitate online discussions, teachers may post questions or videos and prompt students to type their opinions in the comments section.
In the folders tab, teachers can also organize and consolidate class materials for students. Besides engaging students on Edmodo, teachers can also invite parents to the class group. From Edmodo, teachers can send updates and announcements to parents, thus enabling parents to be aware of their child’s progress in school.
Teaching is a noble career, and there are thousands of people in the world that do it. Increasingly, more and more educators are using technology to improve how they educate. Teachers can find a variety of online educational tools to help them in their work. There are many free educational platforms available that teachers can use to teach their students better and more effectively.
2. Moodle
Moodle allows teachers to create and customize a free site for their classes. On Moodle, teachers can manage students and course materials across various subjects or modules that they teach.
Moodle is a powerful tool for teachers to track whether students are clicking through to view or download class materials. Moodle Analytics can also predict and highlight students who are struggling with course content.
When teachers turn to online learning, they worry that the lack of supervision will lead to lower grades among students. With Moodle, teachers can closely monitor the learning progress of students and thus offer their assistance whenever necessary.
3. Udemy
This is a massive online teaching platform with over 2 million students worldwide and 13,000 courses. It lets instructors design robust classes including video lectures, PowerPoint files, screencast videos, documents, audio files, text, and mashup videos. The platform is completely free for instructors to create their courses which they may offer either for free or for a fee. If there is a fee involved, Udemy takes a percentage of that. This is a very professional-looking platform that has a lot to offer.
4. RCampus
One of several online learning platforms, RCampus can be used to create courses, student assignments, keep grades, hold class discussions, and post many types of educational content such as videos, links, images, etc. It can also be used as an ePortfolio management system in which both students and faculty can “build multiple, fully-functional presentation portfolios for demonstrating their skills and knowledge or for career development”.
5. Learnopia
This free online learning platform enables instructors to design and offer courses consisting of a combination of videos, audio files, PowerPoint presentations, and documents such as PDF files, as well as tests consisting of multiple-choice questions. Instructors can choose to make their courses freely available or charge a fee for them. Learnopia takes a percentage of all for-fee courses.
6. Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU)
Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online community of people sharing their knowledge through university-level courses. Experts volunteer their time and resources to create and facilitate courses in their areas of expertise. The courses and their associated materials are free. However, enrollment in each course is limited in order to provide an environment in which the course facilitator and their students can interact in meaningful ways. Learn more about P2PU in the video below.
7. Socrative
Designed by a group of entrepreneurs and engineers passionate about education, Socrative is a system that allows teachers to create exercises or educational games which students can solve using mobile devices, whether smartphones, laptops, or tablets. Teachers can see the results of the activities and, depending on these, modify the subsequent lessons in order to make them more personalized.
8. Projeqt
Projeqt is a tool that allows you to create multimedia presentations, with dynamic slides in which you can embed interactive maps, links, online quizzes, Twitter timelines, and videos, among other options. During a class session, teachers can share with students academic presentations which are visually adapted to different devices.
9. Thinglink
Thinglink allows educators to create interactive images with music, sounds, texts, and photographs. These can be shared on other websites or on social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook. Thinglink offers the possibility for teachers to create learning methodologies that awaken the curiosity of students through interactive content that can expand their knowledge.
10. TED-Ed
TED-Ed is an educational platform that allows creating educational lessons with the collaboration of teachers, students, animators—generally people who want to expand knowledge and good ideas. This website allows democratizing access to information, both for teachers and students. Here, people can have active participation in the learning process of others.
Conclusion
The advent of technology in the 21st century has revolutionized the way in which we learn in a classroom setting. Technology in Education has come a long way from the times when we relied solely on traditional textbooks and chalkboards. We can now learn from online courses, webinars, podcasts, and even YouTube channels.
We live in a digital era where technology and the internet of things are resonating with people. There is no doubt that we can’t be disconnected from online anything or anyone for that matter. With the advancements of technology, comes the idea of getting an education and courses online and there are, of course, tons of free educational platforms for teachers