Teaching online is a bit different from teaching in a conventional classroom. Online, you can’t see your students’ faces and body language and have to rely on the text messages that they send instead. It takes a little getting used to, but once you do, teaching online can be less stressful and even fun! Schools have been using online teaching tools for a long time. It’s because online teaching tools are effective and help to foster collaboration.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Thinkific
Thinkific is similar to Teachable.com in what it does in that they are both platforms on which you, as a freelance trainer or teacher, can add your courses and sell them.
Having tried both Thinkific and Teachable though, I found Teachable far easier to use and to do everything technically and I love the classroom design that students see when they are logged into Teachable.
You might though find Thinkific easier so it can be worth trying out a demo version.
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)
6. Kahoot
Kahoot is a game-based learning platform that lets you create fun learning games. You can make quizzes on any topic and in any language, and customize those quizzes with videos, diagrams, and images. Students participate in “kahoots” (games) by logging the game codes on their device or application.
7. Edpuzzle
With Edpuzzle, you can create interactive video lessons with embedded audio notes, assessments, and quizzes. Its analytics tool enables you to track how students are watching your videos and if they understand the content.
8. Starfall
Starfall is an online service that was initially designed to teach children to read. Its phonics-based learning model supports online games and print series, which can be downloaded for use at home and in the classroom. Now, it also features animated songs, movies, and mathematics activities for Pre-K, Kindergarten, and Grades 1 to 3.
9. SpellQuiz
SpellQuiz is another online service that is mainly focused on helping kids and adults to learn phonics. The platform contains English spelling lessons for individuals from Grade 1 to Adult, as well as fun quizzes and word games.
10. Quizlet
This digital flashcard app makes vocabulary memorization more interactive than it ever was before. Students can use the fun, easy-to-use flashcard sets to quiz themselves or each other, or to play games like Matching or Gravity (keep asteroids from destroying your planet by typing the correct vocabulary word). You can create your own flashcards or choose from the pre-made sets.
Quizlet has been around for a while, so you may already be familiar with its functions. But if you haven’t used it recently, you may not be aware of a new feature called “Quizlet Live,” which is especially great for online teaching. With this app, you can put your students in teams to face each other in a live competition, adding an elusive element of personal interaction to your virtual classroom.
Quizlet also offers opportunities to connect with other language teachers via forums and discussion boards.
11. Planboard
If you struggle with finding or creating just the right template to use for your online lessons, Planboard truly is a lifesaver. You can set up easy-to-use templates aligned to your curriculum standards, which can be used over and over again. You can even add an entire semester’s worth of lesson plans to be tweaked and used again next year (with some improvements, of course). Attachments and images can be added to your lessons with ease.
Even better: you can access the app from any device, so it’s easy to make adjustments to your lessons while you’re on the go.
Conclusion
Teaching online is easy right? Just upload a video, share it with your students, and BAM! Done. Not quite. The tools you use when teaching online are crucial to your success. If the online materials don’t work for you, then you won’t teach to your full potential. In this post, I list the best tools for teaching online to help you out with all aspects of online teaching from lesson development, to video creation and hosting.