Choosing the right software for online teaching is a very important task towards effective elearning. If you are looking for some free as well as commercial software, there are a number of tools that can be used to facilitate online teaching.
It is essential to have a variety of tools to create an engaging learning environment. So check out this blog post and find out about the best software that can be used for elearning purpose.
Zoom – for synchronous video lessons
COVID-19 has made Zoom a household name. But in addition to using Zoom to video call your family, it’s a useful tool for no-frills virtual classrooms and department meetings. Its free version far outstrips Google Hangouts and Skype in terms of participant size—allowing you to host up to 100 participants at once. It also lets you create several breakout rooms, share screens and use group chat for smaller discussions during a lesson. You can easily record calls too—useful for self-critique as you iterate your online teaching methods, and for sharing meetings with colleagues who couldn’t attend.
Price: free for 40-minute calls. Upgrade for $15/month for longer call durations.
Google Classroom – for a free LMS
Learning management system (LMS) software provides a single space for all your organization’s admin, documentation, reporting and training needs, in addition to the tools to plan teaching, host virtual lessons and create assignments. As a tech giant dominating the virtual collaboration space, it’s unsurprising that Google can offer a nice free platform for all the above. Google Classroom brings together all its standard G Suite tools— like Docs, Sheets and Hangouts—to help you seamlessly manage and deliver virtual teaching.
Price: free with a G Suite for Education account. Upgrade to a paid G Suite Enterprise for Education account for premium tools.
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.
Microsoft Teams – for a connected digital learning hub
While stopping short of calling itself an LMS, Microsoft Teams offers a similar suite of virtual teaching tools as Google Classroom and is also happily free. It allows conversations, content and collaboration to happen in one unified digital space. Great for creating secure virtual classrooms, sharing assignments and feedback, and streamlining staff communication.
Price: free for students and teachers with a valid school email address.
Blackboard – for top-of-the-range higher education LMS
Time to get serious—if you’re looking for a purpose-built higher education LMS with a modern and intuitive feel, check out Blackboard. It facilitates fluid, user-friendly digital learning environments with a ton of specialist solutions thrown in. These range from Blackboard Analytics for Learn, which helps you identify barriers to student success, to Blackboard Predict and Blackboard Intelligence which help keep students on track and let you optimize institutional performance. The team at StuDocu swear by it, finding it to be a great platform for delivering sophisticated, engaging online teaching experiences and ensuring everyone gets the right support.
Price: aimed at institutions rather than individuals, Blackboard comes with a hefty license fee.
🙌 Asynchronous support and communication
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.
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.
Slack – for peer and organization communication
Transparent asynchronous is the bedrock of all remote collaboration – it democratizes communication, allowing everyone to access department-wide conversations and talk when it actually suits their schedule. Many remote teams have already realized that email just isn’t the optimal space for that, and are instead using instant messaging platforms like Slack for the bulk of their day-to-day communication. Slack effectively breaks all team communication into thematic groups – called threads – allowing staff to dip in and out of conversations that concern them. It’s a great tool for building an online peer community – creating spaces for colleagues to share best practices, exchange ideas, share global updates and just check-in on each other.
Price: $7/month per person for their smallest plan.
Floop – for work questions and support
For students, Floop is the virtual equivalent of raising your hand in class. It was built by teachers to solve the challenge of providing tailored support and feedback to individual students learning remotely. Students can quickly send pictures of their work with anchored comments, so they can highlight exactly where they are stuck and raise questions. Teachers just need to reply to the comment to provide targeted feedback. A handy tool if you’re working with analogue or read-only digital materials – although you might want to prioritize using collaborative document platforms like Dropbox Paper longer-term.
Price: free for now, but pricing will be announced for the 2020-21 school year.
SmartSurvey– for feedback on remote teaching
Feedback is crucial for making distanced learning work – especially in the early days as you adapt your approach to an online setting. If you go in for one of the heavy-duty learning management systems detailed above, you’ll likely have a few options for posing questions and reviewing engagement data. But if you don’t, simple online survey platforms like SmartSurvey are a good alternative. Use it with students to see how well you explained certain concepts, as well as with teaching staff to surface admin blind spots and gauge wellbeing.
Price: free for sending a maximum of 15 questions to 100 people.
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.
eduClipper
This platform allows teachers and students to share and explore references and educational material. In eduClipper, you can collect information found on the internet and then share it with the members of previously created groups, which offers the possibility to manage more effectively the academic content found online, improve research techniques, and have a digital record of what students achieved during the course. Likewise, it provides the opportunity for teachers to organize a virtual class with their students and create a portfolio where all the work carried out is stored.
Edmondo – for centralized teacher-student communication
Primarily targeted at school teachers, Edmondo helps you centralize all tutor-student and tutor-parent communications. It’s effectively a social platform – with familiar post and direct messaging functionality – for classroom discussion and organization. You can use it to share assignments and materials, help students learn new virtual tools, post classroom updates or chat directly with individuals. A useful asynchronous teaching tool for students who may not always have access to a home computer or a strong Wi-Fi connection.
Price: completely free, with a paid “Schools” plan for larger organizations.
💡 Organization, structure and time management
9. Timely – for managing time and staying visible
Shifting teaching and infrastructure to the virtual space comes with a significantly increased workload. When you factor in childcare, remote teaching from home becomes a blur of competing demands – a sure recipe for burnout. Timely helps you stay in control by creating a flawless digital timeline of everything you work on each day, which is especially useful if you also bill for your teaching. Its intuitive calendar interface helps you time block your day and see how long you actually end up spending on different tasks. Timely also lets you break down exactly how many hours you and your team work each day, so everyone can stay visible, stick to their hours and get proactive support. Ideal for managing faculty staff remotely, as well as structuring your own schedule.
Price: trial all features free for 14 days. Upgrade if it’s love – $5/month for individuals, $39/month for organizations.
Conclusion
There was a time when you as a teacher had to physically be in the classroom for the whole class period. But thanks to new and exciting advancements in technology, that’s no longer the case. With online teaching software or online teaching tools , we can teach or run workshops from anywhere! Online teaching software has made it possible for us to become virtual teachers and classrooms. The best part of these online teaching tools is that they’re 100% available for free!