Welcome to Online Teaching Resources Tools: a selection of free online teaching tools. This site aims to help you find the best free online teaching tools that are easy to use, appropriate for your subject, and support how you want to teach.
Online teaching resources tools – Today, we fondly know of a place with endless information, huge sources of entertainment and self-development, and a place where opportunities are endless. This is the internet. Information and resources are abundant online. As such, you can find hundreds of free online teaching resources tools to make your online teaching easier and more rewarding.
Want to become an online teacher? Do you have something to say? You just need a simple application, your computer and an internet connection to become an online teacher. However, if you are a complete beginner in the world of teaching via Internet, it can be quite hard to find the first steps. Today I’m going to present some teaching resources tools that could help you with checking new courses, searching for instructions and watching other teachers.
These online teaching tools provide the best value for money and enable educational institutions to get the most out of their IT budget. Ease of use is often a deciding factor in the selection and integration of an online teaching tool, which is why our products are designed so that people really do not need any technical training at all.
Online Classrooms
Today’s students are comfortable and familiar with using the internet to gain information about unknown topics. In the past a person would have gone to the library and referred to an encyclopedia for information. Today we pull smartphones out of our pockets and ask Google to tell us all about any topic. It is for that reason many students wish to facilitate some of their own learning rather than coming to school and waiting to learn at a teacher-led pace. There are three main types of online classrooms that teachers need to be aware of to meet their students’ learning needs.
1. Blended Classrooms
Blended classrooms use a combination of face-to-face instruction with a teacher at school mixed with some online student-facilitated learning, using the online tools and resources that a teacher gathers and organizes for student usage.
2. Flipped Classrooms
A flipped classroom also involves students using online student-facilitated learning, but what is different about a flipped classroom is that students are solely responsible for learning prior to coming into a physical classroom. Projects and activities are done in the classroom led by the teacher with the assumption students have already learned the online assigned content.
3. Distance Education Classrooms
Distance education classes, sometimes called virtual schools, consist of 100 percent of instruction via the internet and teacher-provided online tools. In this type of classroom a teacher and student would never interact in the same physical space.
Google Classroom
Created for teaching and learning, Google Classroom is an all-in-one tool that makes learning flexible and accessible from anywhere in the world. Teachers save time when creating lesson plans, tracking student performance and using several creative tools to make course material more exciting.
Currently, there is a free version of Google Classroom. However, a paid version is on its way with add-ons and easy integration with other educational tools.
Prodigy Math Game
Prodigy Math Game is an adaptive learning platform for grades 1 to 8. Aligned to curriculum across the United States and around the world, you can be confident that students will stay engaged and learning no matter where they are.
Use your free teacher dashboard to easily differentiate math practice, send home assessment and get real-time insights into how students are learning — no grading required.
Pear Deck
Pear Deck is a Google Slides add-on that helps teachers create engaging slides and support student interaction. Teachers can create presentations from scratch or add interactive questions to existing presentations.
Pear Deck has amazing features including a dashboard that’s available on a phone or tablet, the ability to show or hide student responses, features that let you send personalized notes to individual students and fun audio files to add to presentations.
Flipgrid
Flipgrid is a fun way to get a conversation started. Simply post a topic and foster discussions within your learning community. It’s a great way to get students interested in new ideas, excited to learn and engaging with their peers!
Edmodo
Edmodo is an educational tool that connects teachers and students, and is assimilated into a social network. In this one, teachers can create online collaborative groups, administer and provide educational materials, measure student performance, and communicate with parents, among other functions. Edmodo has more than 34 million users who connect to create a learning process that is more enriching, personalized, and aligned with the opportunities brought by technology and the digital environment.
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.
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.
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.
Easelly
Infographics are incredibly popular online, and for good reason: They help make sense of facts, figures and statistics by illustrating their meaning and drawing connections between them. These are crucial skills for students learning to research, so why not let them create infographics to organize their findings? Easelly provides templates for students to use. Once they’ve chosen a format, they can type in their info and customize artwork to develop a fun, easy-to-read infographic on their topic.
Powtoon
If you like the look of infographics but want to animate them, Powtoon is for you. Powtoon provides slides like PowerPoint, but makes it a lot of fun to choose images, objects and characters come to life when you run the slide show. With plenty of basic templates and lots of options to personalize the animations, student are sure to find this a fun way to make their presentations more interesting for their classmates to watch.
Animoto
Teaching your class the finer points of video editing is very time consuming, but Animoto lets you take a major shortcut. This drag-and-drop program makes it easy for students to add video clips, photos and text that they cut together into a short, share video. This is perfect for creating PSAs, trailers, and advertisements as a capstone project, and teachers can get it for free.
Glogster
Remember the good old-fashioned poster project? This is still a great format for younger users making projects focused on a single topic or idea. Glogster brings the poster into the twenty-first century by allowing you to add clip art, video, audio and images directly to the screen — all while keeping everything on one page for easy navigation (and grading!).
Canva
Canva’s online graphic and publishing tool allows teachers to create stunning, professional-quality presentations, posters, infographics, social media banners, videos, Zoom virtual backgrounds, and more. Sign up for the free version or purchase one of their plans geared toward teachers and students.
Canva easily integrates with your preferred learning management system, including Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams.
Zoom
Zoom gained popularity during the pandemic for its versatility as a presentation tool and webinar platform while students learned online. Its security, live video class functionality and chat feature for social interaction make Zoom a useful distance learning tool.
Blackboard
Blackboard is an advanced LMS tool perfectly suited for kindergarten to high school. This platform works on any device and it’s easily accessible to all students. Blackboard Learn also gives teachers access to several third-party tools.
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 an active participation in the learning process of others.
cK-12
cK-12 is a website that seeks to reduce the cost of academic books for the K12 market in the United States and the world. To achieve its objective, this platform has an open source interface that allows creating and distributing educational material through the internet, which can be modified and contain videos, audios, and interactive exercises. It can also be printed and comply with the necessary editorial standards in each region. The books that are created in cK-12 can be adapted to the needs of any teacher or student.
ClassDojo
ClassDojo is a tool to improve student behavior: teachers provide their students with instant feedback so that good disposition in class is ‘rewarded’ with points and students have a more receptive attitude towards the learning process. ClassDojo provides real-time notifications to students, like ‘Well Done David!’ and ‘+1’, for working collaboratively. The information that is collected about student behavior can be shared later with parents and administrators through the web.
VoiceThread
VoiceThread is a platform that allows your students to share their presentations in a brand new way. It’s not presentation software on its own, but it adds a layer of interaction to the projects your students have already made. Upload a photo, report, slideshow, video, or other presentation into VoiceThread for others to see and comment on. Once they’ve seen your work, students and teachers can add video comments and questions for a more personal interaction. This is a great way to foster collaboration and critique via technology — particularly good for asynchronous teaching and learning.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams brings the best of several worlds together under one roof. You can share your screen or notes, conduct presentations, promote chatting and bring everyone together through video conferencing.
Nearpod
Nearpod is a fantastic add-on for Google Slides and PowerPoint presentations. Teachers may use their own presentations or select from lessons and videos in their impressive template library. Build polls, games and collaborative boards to keep your students interested to learn. Nearpod promotes healthy social interaction between students.
Nearpod includes free accounts for teachers!
Buncee
Buncee makes it easy to create interactive course content that students love. Create presentations, lessons and many customizable virtual school activities from Buncee’s Ideas Lab template library. Teachers can easily share links, downloadable files and group projects with students.
The Buncee dashboard can be accessed from Microsoft Teams, which makes it easy to open discussions, share resources and communicate with kids and their parents.
Provide support via online tools
Responding to emails can be a frustrating task for many jobs, and especially for a professor the week before an assignment is due. Trying to get through a flood of emails can seem like a daunting and even unproductive task. It can sometimes take several emails to explain something that could have been resolved in five minutes of a ‘face-to-face’ conversation via video conferencing software. For this reason, it’s essential that your synchronous teaching involves online support.
Even in the midst of distance education, students can still make meaningful contact with their professors. You can set up online office hours by being available on Google Hangouts so students can initiate a video chat with you. You can even have a video conference feed going the entire hour and students can join the call and exit once their query is resolved.
Another way to provide synchronous support is through a live Q&A on social media. Many organizations, such as the Ontario College of Teachers have live conversations organized by a central hashtag on Twitter. Using a unique hashtag for your course—such as #canlithelp if you’re teaching Canadian Literature—allows students to send you tweets at a pre-specified time, organized through the hashtag. Although Twitter has a 280 character count, social media facilitates a digestible, informal way for students to reflect on their learning experience in your course. It can also keep the conversation going if students continue to use the hashtag during times outside the Q&A period.
Twitter provides unrestricted access to experts in instructional design and online teaching. You may wish to browse through hashtags such as #onlineteaching and #instructionalcontinuity for support designing your online course around your class’ needs in order to prioritize student success.
Conclusion
The school year is fast approaching and many of us are in summer planning mode. Whether you’re teaching in-person, via distance learning, or hybrid learning, these days we’re all looking for teach experience but also building a whole new set of skills. Our journey to this changed reality has been challenging and even painful at times, but it has also pulled us together as educators and broken down barriers between educators and their communities. As a teacher, you’re the heart of your classroom. You know how exciting and rewarding it is when children achieve their full potential, when they build the knowledge, skills, and self-confidence to take on the world.
If you have a passion for teaching and you are looking for extra income, then you should consider online teaching. The use of online teaching tools should be more systematic and effective in order to ensure the good results. It is essential in managing both your time and the students’ learning process. Online teachers need to look for available opportunities that can also help them earn money by partnering with other education institutions.