Everyone in this world wants to be a teacher, or at least they should. The knowledge that you possess can be used for generations to come. However, the method in which you teach matters tremendously.
Here are a few tools for teachers which will help them in their endeavor.
Zoom
Zoom is a platform that was originally designed for business meetings online and for companies to have an online space for employees. Zoom though has developed into an excellent tool for use as a virtual classroom and their software is now used by:
- Individual teachers (my yoga teacher in the UK is even using it now to provide online yoga lessons)
- Universities and schools to create large virtual classrooms for hundreds of students
- Businesses to provide staff and employees live online training as eLearning modules or real-time online classes and tuition.
Conclusion: Great for teaching online for both individual freelance trainers, and for both small and large companies. One of the best tools on the market for providing online training.
2. Skype Video
a) For Freelance Trainers and Individuals Teaching Online
Skype video has traditionally been very popular for video calls to family and friends but Skype is also increasingly being used by businesses these days and it is an excellent option if you are looking to provide both teaching and training online. Skype also, by the way, integrates nicely with Microsoft teams (see below).
As an individual offering corporate training online (i.e. if you are self-employed), you can use the personal version of Skype and this is an incredibly easy and cheap way to offer online classes and lessons 1-to-1. It’s also a great tool for researchers such as those doing Skype interviews for Masters and PhD research.
On Skype, you can easily share your screen with the people or person you are chatting with by clicking the overlapping boxes at the bottom of the interface. You will see these boxes when you are in a video call with someone (see image above).
b) For Company Training Online (and Co-working Space Online)
Skype is also excellent for Groups!
In addition to being an excellent option for team meetings and online co-working space, you can use Skype Groups for teaching and training employees and staff from afar.
Wherever in the world you physically are, you can provide external or in-house training online, for up to 50 people at a time.
Conclusion: Brilliant for offering 1-to-1 teaching and training online especially for teaching languages and for many one-to-one topics. Also a very good option for busineeses of any size.
3. MS Teams
If you are a fan of Microsoft and already use their software such as Microsoft 365, then you will very likely love their online collaboration software.
I’ve used Microsoft Teams and it is always easy even for those people not used to working and collaborating online. I prefer ‘Zoom’ for teaching online in all honesty but for team meetings and office chats, this is as good as any option (although not the cheapest).
Conclusion: Particularly good for larger companies and very easy to use for online teachers and trainers.
EdApp
EdApp’s new public microlearning courseware platform Educate All is free for teachers, students and anyone else on the planet who has a desire to learn. Together with UNITAR, EdApp is redefining what we mean by ‘team micro teaching’ by creating a true global village of educators.
EdApp’s authoring tool is an excellent way to effectively educate your learners with vital knowledge and skills. EdApp’s content library is populated with course topics ranging from addressing global challenges, leadership and entrepreneurship to hospitality and physical exercise. Powerful learner metrics are available for learner assessment, and EdApp’s Brain Boost spaced repetition feature is next to none. You can access EdApp’s mobile-based LMS for free!
Train your teams using the best free teacher tool
No credit card required.
Seesaw
Seesaw is a digital portfolio app that captures student work through the use of photos, videos, and audio. This free teacher tool enables students to showcase their work and collaborate with their peers. Using the Seesaw blog platform, students gain an authentic sense of authorship and are able to share ideas and feedback constructively in a safe teacher-moderated space.
The app is also a fantastic way of enhancing parent-school engagement (which we all know is a key factor in positive student outcomes), as they are able to sign in with QR codes. The reflective opportunities Seesaw provides is my favourite feature. By getting students to reflect on teacher feedback, it completes the learning loop—essentially promoting ‘feeding forward’ rather than feedback as an effective learning model.
Kahoot
As a teacher, I always had a stockpile of Kahoot! quizzes in my back pocket. I would use them as a form of face-to-face spaced repetition on a regular basis in order to refresh student understanding, and I would also have them on hand to pull out whenever I needed to inject a bit of competition and energy into the classroom. It is an awesome way to gamify learning and training through play. Word of warning though: students and adults alike LOVE Kahoot! so much they will literally beg for more!
Socrative
Socrative is a free teacher tool that allows educators to gather end-of-class/training feedback. Long before Socrative came along, I would get students to hand in paper ‘exit tickets’ as they left the classroom (usually brief 1-2 sentence responses on a specific question or a reflection on what they learnt). Exit tickets are a form of formative assessment that enables teachers to adapt the learning roadmap according to student understanding, and zoom in on particular hotspots. Socrative provides a digital version of ‘exit tickets’ along with a host of other gamified features such as the team-based Space Race quizzes.
Padlet
Padlet, effectively a digital pinboard, was another game-changer in my teaching methods. I used this free teacher tool in two ways; first, to create an anonymous question board where students pin up virtual sticky notes with questions that both the teacher and other students can respond to, and second, to save articles and web content that I have curated for particular topics. So much more engaging than your usual ‘required reading’ list!
Google Docs
It is a no-brainer to include Google Docs on any Top 20 list of free tech for teachers. There’s nothing fancy about Google Docs, but once you embrace it, I promise that you’ll never go back to native word processing apps again! It’s collaboration-friendly, allowing students to build off each other’s ideas, and allows teachers to provide real-time feedback on student work.
MindMeister
MindMeister leads the pack of free mind mapping apps that helps students visualise their thinking. It is mobile friendly and allows students to share maps and build them collaboratively in real-time.
Canva
Canva is a super-cool drag and drop graphic design tool that is 100% free for teachers and students. Students can play with a huge library of professionally designed infographics and posters to visualise their learning, and for adding a ‘wow factor’ to their presentations. It’s also a super-handy tool for teacher handouts!
FlipGrid
Flipgrid is Snapchat for the classroom. It is a free teacher tool that allows students to engage in discussion via short and sharp creative videos, all in a safe teacher-moderated space.
If you dream about embracing augmented reality in your classroom, but are just too intimidated to take the first step, Metaverse is the app for you. You don’t need to know a scrap of coding to create your own Metaverse interactive story or game. Guaranteed off the chart engagement!
Poll Everywhere
Poll Everywhere is a super simple live polling app that collects participant responses in any context (whether that be a classroom, meeting or corporate training event) using SMS, the web, or Twitter. Poll Everywhere results can then be displayed live in presentations. It’s a quick way to spot-check student understanding as well as gather constructive feedback on lesson effectiveness.
Mentimeter
Mentimeter is another app that generates live polls in the form of creative visualisations. It is also a word cloud generator, which is great for brainstorming sessions and pre-discussion prompts..
Google Hangouts (for Teachers)
Google Hangouts is another video conferencing service that is also great for those of you looking to provide live classes and lessons online. With hangouts you can:
- Share screens and files
- Chat
- Use a shares hangout space to collaborate
You will need to have a Google account, so if you already use Gmail you will already have a Google account that you can use for Google Hangouts. The short intro video below gives you a flavor of hangouts and how you can use it as an online trainer or teacher.https://www.youtube.com/embed/QwQGPr78vxQ?feature=oembed
Conclusion: Whilst Zoom is my favourite, Google Hangouts is more than sufficient and really quite easy to use for teaching online.
Paid Tools for Providing Training Online
5. Teachable
Teachable is one of the world’s leaders and the biggest platform worldwide for placing your courses online as a trainer, for users to study in their own time and at their own pace.
Teachable also provides a very clean and stylish online school for you. Furthermore, it is very user-friendly and offers very affordable plans that accommodate all trainers and teachers looking to add their courses online.
On Teachable, you:
- Create your school
- Add your content by uploading videos, text, images or whatever content you want to add and include in your lessons
- You set the pricing of your courses and design your sales page/s (inside teachable)
Here at Symonds Training, we ourselves use Teachable for our ‘Train the Trainer Online Course’ and for our sister site’s Blogging for Beginners online course.
Conclusion: Teachable is the best option if you are looking to add your own online course as a trainer and so that your users can individually study your course online in their own time from anywhere.
Conclusion
It was once thought that in coming decades, the only way to make money in the future was to invest in real estate, or put all your efforts into breeding cattle or pigs. Thankfully for us evolutionary man found other ways to make money by creating jobs which can be done online today. If you are looking for ways to earn money online, the Internet is your oyster! You just need to find creative ways of doing so.