While all teachers will agree that teaching is more than a job, and probably the noblest profession one can engage in, the real truth for teachers is that teaching often means a lot of work at home. And there’s not much time for tools. So the idea of educational tools for teachers might be just another one of those wonderful pipe-dreams of a teacher who’s been working hard in his classroom with little or no reward. Or is it?
Teachers have a lot on their plate, from lesson plans and grading papers to engaging their students. What makes the job even harder is that classroom sizes are still growing and budget cuts are becoming increasingly common. All those issues can make a teacher’s job extremely difficult and time-consuming in the 21st-century classroom. But if you’re reading this right now, you’re probably a teacher who wants to find ways to improve his or her workday. And I have good news! There are tons of tremendously helpful tools available online to make your life easier — some of which you might already be using!
Teaching is a demanding profession. It is not just about quietly going through the motions, but being able to engage students with your teaching and material. Many teachers today prefer to utilize technology in the classroom rather than teach everything on the chalkboard, thus education software has become more popular in recent years. Here are some tools that will make teaching easier, and more interactive for you and your students.
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.
Storybird
Storybird aims to promote writing and reading skills in students through storytelling. In this tool, teachers can create interactive and artistic books online through a simple and easy to use interface. The stories created can be embedded in blogs, sent by email, and printed, among other options. In Storybird, teachers can also create projects with students, give constant feedback, and organize classes and grades.
Animoto
Animoto is a digital tool that allows you to create high-quality videos in a short time and from any mobile device, inspiring students and helping improve academic lessons. The Animoto interface is friendly and practical, allowing teachers to create audiovisual content that adapts to educational needs.
Kahoot!
Kahoot! is an educational platform that is based on games and questions. Through this tool, teachers can create questionnaires, discussions, or surveys that complement academic lessons. The material is projected in the classroom and questions are answered by students while playing and learning at the same time. Kahoot! promotes game-based learning, which increases student engagement and creates a dynamic, social, and fun educational environment.
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!
Paymo
Paymo is a full-fledged project management software offered free of charge for Schools, Colleges & Universities. Paymo works well as a school management software thanks to its helpful features and multiple layers of access and user permissions.
The platform is excellent for all sorts of collaboration: student-teacher collaboration, peer collaboration, and even among staff members. For example, teachers (or professors) can organize classwork, plan projects of all kinds, and track their own time for proof of work. As ‘project managers,’ they can also supervise students’ logged hours (enrolled as ‘project members’).
When organizing coursework and assignments, teachers can easily set deadlines and milestones across the Calendar view, assign students to upload their work, and chat in real-time through comments or on the discussion board. All the information can be visualized in multiple ways, from mapping your to-do list (List & Table view) as sticky notes (Board view) or following the classwork progress one task at a time (Gantt view). And there’s a lot more to be explored in Paymo that helps you manage your classroom and projects.
Buncee
Buncee understands how much more kids learn if they’re engaged, so their platform makes it easy to engage students from anywhere. Teachers have the flexibility to create activities that their class will enjoy with over 1000 templates, and students earn badges as they complete their work. Buncee also makes it easy for students to collaborate with sharing and discussion functionality.
Bakpax
Bakpax is an AI tool that autogrades student work, giving them (and the teacher) instant feedback on assignments! As teachers know, hand grading student work can take hours, so Bakpax allows teachers to save time with the more administrative aspects of teaching, so they can focus more on creative lessons/activities and individualizing student instruction.
Bakpax wants to support educators during the transition to remote learning, so teachers can currently access Bakpax for free!
Pear Deck
Pear Deck allows teachers to make lessons interactive so every student can actively participate, whether instruction is synchronous or asynchronous. It utilizes formative assessment, active learning, retrieval practice, and more to close the achievement gap, even for students who are learning from afar. Bonus: PearDeck has the stamp of approval from many Ozobot Certified Educators.
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!
Conclusion
Teachers are meant to help and educate others. How can this be done best? Well, we should simplify the interaction between the teacher and their students. Everything must be simple, clear, quick, and easy to understand. This leads us to an interesting conclusion; the more complex something is, the more difficult it becomes for us and our students. To address this issue we decided to create a list of online teaching tools for teachers which will enhance online education for both teachers and students alike.