Online teaching and learning is packed with apps and tools to enhance your online classroom and help you leverage the benefits of technology. Working as a teacher is hard enough, but trying to plan engaging lessons, learn new material and grade assignments can be daunting – let alone work out how technology can be used to improve your lesson plans.
Thankfully, there are plenty of online teaching apps that will take care of this for you.
Academy of Mine
The Enterprise Online Course Platform Custom-Built to Your Business ($499/month)
Academy of Mine is a high-end eLearning platform founded on personalized customer success and philosophy of customization.
It’s truly a learning management system that works best in different business niches. A standard feature of any plan is completely free development hours to help set up and launch your course with customized integrations.
One of their goals is not just to set you up and help you launch. They also want to help sell your course with their marketing tools and analytics dashboards.
Personalization is at the heart of its strategy. Are you a healthcare company that wants to create a full curriculum for continuing education credits (CECs)? They can help with that.
Are you an insurance company that requires continued training due to constant changes in a particular legal code at the state level? Are you looking to create online courses to manage your facility?
That’s also no problem with Academy of Mine.
While these enterprise offerings may be overkill for typical users, they are necessary for small to medium-sized businesses needing a robust training system for their employees or clients.
If this sounds like the eLearning solution you’re looking for, you can get started today with their 30-day free trial.Try Academy of Mine
Coursera
Coursera is a professional online course marketplace with virtual classes from some of the world’s best companies and universities like the University of Michigan, Duke, and Stanford.
Instructors teach Coursera courses at some of the world’s top universities, take about 4-6 weeks to complete, and include video lectures, peer-reviewed assignments, and community discussion forums.
What does Coursera cost?
Coursera is free to join, and you must be logged in to see pricing information on individual courses. There are three tiers of class offerings at Coursera.
- Main courses run on a subscription basis and cost $29-99/month. These take the standard 4-6 weeks to complete, and you receive an electronic course certificate upon completion.
- Specialization courses are for mastering a specific career skill and cost between $39-79/month. In these online courses, you tackle real business challenges with hands-on projects and more rigorous coursework.
- Online degree programs. If you’re looking for a more advanced education, you can even take part in university-recognized online degree programs. These take 1-3 years to complete and cost anywhere from $15 to $25,000.
Give Coursera a try.Try Coursera
WizIQ.
Affordable Live Virtual Online Classrooms ($27/month)
WizIQ offers teachers and educators an easy way to set up virtual classrooms for live interactive online classes. Over 400,000 instructors have leveraged WizIQ to teach over 4 million students virtual classes across 200 countries.
They provide the latest tools for live training such as discussion boards, video streaming, mobile options, assessments, and analytics.
If you are an educator or corporate leader that wants to reach your audience live anywhere in the world, you can get started with their 14-day free trial.
BehaviorFlip
This platform was built with “Restorative Justice” practices in mind. Teachers are able to track students’ “coachable” behaviors in two categories—respect and responsibility—in order to help them detect patterns and provide a starting point for talking with students. The tool also lets teachers reward students for behaviors that demonstrate resiliency. It even has a mechanism for indicating whether behavior issues have been resolved after an incident.
Bouncy Balls
This fun web-based tool helps to keep noise at a reasonable level in the classroom. Teachers can open the website and set it up for students to view. When the classroom is quiet, the balls stay settled at the bottom of the screen, but when the noise in class starts to rise, the balls get more active, giving everyone in the room a visual cue about how noisy they’re getting in class.
Discord
Description: An open-source (invite-only?) platform originally created for people who play and stream video games. Discord is separated into interest-based channels with available video streaming available for Mac or via your browser.
Pricing: Free
Miro
Description: An online, collaborative whiteboard platform
Pricing: Free for up to three whiteboards; additional tiers up to $16/mo for unlimited boards and additional collaboration features
Instabridge (Free, Unlimited)
Instabridge is the world’s largest WiFi password sharing community, created by a Swedish company and utilized throughout the entire world. Consider this map-style app when you are in a new city searching for free WiFi, trying to avoid asking baristas for their internet passwords over and over again. This master key is a connection to any available hotspot you didn’t know you could have access to, whether you’re using an Android, IOS, laptop, or iPad. It is also quite useful when traveling to a known location, like a friend’s beach house or cabin. Friends can share private passwords on their Instabridge accounts, choosing who to share with and when to change access codes. With this kind of easy encryption, you might consider working further and further from home than ever before!
PdaNet+ (Free Limited Mode / $7.95 Unlimited)
PdaNet+, once known as FoxFi, is a WiFi tethering application available primarily to Android 4.1 and up users. If there is no root access to the internet where you are going, you can make your own WiFi connection! This particular ad hoc networking app can work in three different modes:
- By also utilizing the separate FoxFi app, you can work with the Hotspot feature. This is considered the older operation of PdaNet+, with metered hotspot usage which the app cannot currently avoid (aka, it could be much slower than you initially anticipate).
- The USB mode of this app allows for direct connection to a Windows or Mac device via a cable. This method now includes a “WiFi Share” feature increasing your ability to utilize Windows to share the internet with other devices!
- Bluetooth mode is another method of connection, though the creators of the PdaNet+ app encourage users to utilize WiFi Direct instead. WiFi Direct is extremely useful for high-speed, multimedia file transfers.
The PdaNet+ app will be most useful to those with an Android device that prompts a call to the phone’s carrier for assistance when trying to turn on the hotspot feature, or those with a metered hotspot usage. While it may only take minutes to download and set up this mobile app to teach online, it is a good idea to take time before a trip and figure out which of the three modes above flow well with your combination of devices.
Mobile Dictation Apps
Mobile dictation apps are helpful for teachers who plan on the go. Keep in touch with your students by providing direct daily or weekly recorded announcements, or review your own dictated notes and lesson plans with ease between your devices.
Dragon Anywhere: Dictate Now ($14.99/month)
Dictation apps can be found on any smartphone today but, much like the texting feature autocorrect, the accuracy rate is average at best. The mobile app Dragon by Nuance accurately scribes your dictation at a rate of 99%. Think that’s smart? Dragon can also be trained to how you speak through features such as a “Correction Menu”, voice editing and formatting. The Dragon Anywhere app is considered one of the best mobile apps for teaching online because it provides a platform for detailed assessment of student work, is a faster method of creating and compiling lesson plans, syllabi, and other lists, and allows for more effective management of communication.
Evernote (Free/$7.99 a month Premium/$14.99 a month Business)
On the move, with no time to sit and take notes? Here’s where Evernote can help. With the ability to sync up to two devices (more if you decide to go premium), this mobile application for teachers makes it easy to collect ideas, research, and notes anywhere! While the primary use of the app is to record and file audio, increasing productivity for dictating lectures, and lesson plans, it can also be used to scan documents, save web pages, and apply rich formatting to your notes. An extra interesting feature of this mobile app for teaching online is the ability to connect to other apps! Consider clipping notes from Slack into Evernote or sharing information to collaborate and organize on Microsoft Teams. Integrating your email with this app can improve workflow, and keep you efficient while on the go. No one can deny that instant email access is essential for the best mobile applications for teaching online.
Conclusion
Teachers have been able to teach online for a long time. Using one of the many online teaching tools, they have been able to create their own class and communicate with their students from anywhere in the world. There are a lot of ways that teachers have been able to teach online through tools such as Skype. Some of these apps are new and innovative while some others offer a new twist on old methods.