If your students are looking to collaborate online, assemble a portfolio or project, or present their work – there are a lot of tools you can use to help them achieve this. One of the biggest advantages of using these tools is that they’re free. If you want to learn more about using these tools with your students – check out my guide below.”
1- Flipgrid
‘Flipgrid is a video-based discussion platform you can use to engage your students in a wide variety of learning experiences. The way it works is very simple: as a teacher you create a grid for your class, then you add a topic for discussion and students share their responses in short recorded videos. Students can also view and reply to each others video feedback and build a dynamic interactive learning community. As the creator of a grid, you get access to different moderating features that include the ability to password lock your grid and approve videos before they are shared with others in your grid community. And if you have a classroom blog or website, you can easily embed your grids and videos there.’
2- Quizziz
‘Quizizz allows you to create interactive quiz games to use in your instruction for a number of educational purposes including formative assessment. Quiz games you create have up to 4 answer options including a correct answer. You can also add images to the background of your questions and customize the settings of your questions the way you want. When your quizzes are ready you can share them with your students using a generated 5 digit code.’
3- Tinkercad
This is a simple and easy to use 3D design and 3D printing app that allows students to engage in various hands-on activities involving the making of toys, prototypes, Minecraft models using Tinkercad ’s building blocks.
‘From preschool to middle school, LEGO Education provides a continuum of hands-on playful learning tools that engage every student’s natural curiosity, and help them develop the skills and confidence they’ll need in the future.’
5- Sutori
Sutori is a great digital storytelling platform students can use to create and share stories. Sutori offers a number of interesting features most important of them is story collaboration which allows students to work on the same story together and in realtime just as is the case in a Google doc. Students can embed different forms of multimedia content into their stories including images, videos, text, podcast and audio. Besides using YouTube videos, students can even upload their own videos and use them in their stories.’
Google Drive services such as Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites, Forms, and Drawings are all excellent tools to plan, organize and engage students in various collaborative learning projects including the creation of presentations, questionnaires, surveys, spreadsheets, charts and many more.
7- Canva
If you are to engage students in creating educational visuals such as posters and infographics Canva is a good option to use. Students can utilize it to design various document types including: brochures, newsletters, book covers, logos, reports, flyers and many more.
‘Looking for inspiration for a science fair project? Science Buddies has over 1,150 Project Ideas in all areas of science. The Topic Selection Wizard tool can help you find a project you will enjoy!’
9- Padlet
‘Padlet is a digital canvas to create beautiful projects that are easy to share and collaborate on. It works like a piece of paper. We give you an empty page – a padlet – and you can put whatever you like on it. Drag in a video, record an interview, snap a selfie, write your own text posts or upload some documents, and voilà! A padlet is born. Make it even more beautiful by choosing custom wallpapers and themes.’
‘This is a great platform that students can use to practice their writing and digital storytelling skills through generating strip comics. Students are provided with a wide variety of characters, objects, speech bubbles, and thought cubes to use to create their stories. After they are done they can download, print or share their work through popular social media websites.’
15 Technology Tools To Engage Students In The Classroom
1. Augmented Reality Apps
Here are some augmented reality apps to get started.
2. Flipgridhttps://2e29c003fe2fd752dc976eeecdcb4b1e.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Video is a wonderful engagement tool. Add a social dynamic in a school-friendly architecture and you’ve got Flipgrid. See some ideas on ideas for using Flipgrid in the classroom.
3. Video Games
I know this is general–merely saying ‘video games’ isn’t actually a ‘student engagement tool.’ However, video games literally don’t work without player input–and thus student engagement. The right game could change your classroom. Here are some examples of video games you can teach with.
4. Google Forms
We’re starting with what’s likely the simplest app on the list (well–aside the from background noise strategy): Google Forms
One of the best ways to engage all students in your classroom is to give students an easy (and even anonymous) way to ask questions, receive feedback, or otherwise reach out to the teacher. While there are many ways to do this, one of the most universally accessible (and free) methods is Google Forms.
Whether you provide specific questions and prompts for students to respond to as an exit slip (e.g., Was there any point during today’s lesson where you were confused?), or you simple leave it as a way for students to post questions anonymously (which can be useful for some struggling students who might otherwise be hesitant to reach out), a simple messaging system or basic form can help improve student engagement.
5. Socrativehttps://2e29c003fe2fd752dc976eeecdcb4b1e.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Like a few others on this list, you’ve likely heard of Socrative, a tool to “assess student understanding with prepared activities or on-the-fly questions, then adjust your teaching based on the results.”
6. Kahoot!
Kahoot! is a handy tool that students can use to create in-class questionnaires and quizzes. This is handy for obtaining data for graphing assignments, data for research essays, and feedback from their classmates. Kahoot! is compatible with multiple devices and has a game-like feel that will help keep students interested.
7. Class Dojo
This is a fun tool to gamify the classroom. Students make their own avatars, gain and lose points based on classroom behavior, discussion approaches, and other soft skills agreed upon by the teacher and the class. Teachers can also use Class Dojo to take attendance and create graphs that breakdown the information for teachers. Not only will this tool encourage students to uphold class values, but it will also provide key metrics to help teachers adjust their teaching tactics accordingly.
8. Clickers
Classroom clickers may not be the higher-water mark for innovation in education, but as a simple and useful tool that you can use almost every day, it’s a no-brainer for many classrooms.
This is a tool for teachers, to help assess students’ understanding of concepts and their engagement with the material. With some tools, teachers can project questions onto their screen using while students answer them in real-time. Students’ answers show up on the teacher’s phone screen, and teachers can see which students got answers right and which didn’t. This gives teachers an accurate picture of how students are following the information, and adjust their lessons accordingly.
Note, this is more of a general recommendation than an endorsement of a specific clicker tool or app. The problem with this otherwise ‘no-doubter’ recommendation is that many of the clicker tools are expensive–at least the ones we know of. Plickers, iClicker, Top Hat, and other tools are not only not free but often have monthly subscription-level pricing. If your school has the budget and you put it to good use, it’s likely worth the investment.
Immediate responses from every single student instantly? That’s a great strategy for engaging students.
9. Edvoice
Edvoice is a feature-rich communication tool with everything from lesson planning and rubrics, to messaging, announcements, notifications, and even tools to help prevent (or respond to) bullying in the classroom.
10. Background Noise
Depending on what you want the students engage in–you, one another, content, an assignment, etc.–they need to be able to focus, and classroom aren’t always the easiest places to do that. Background noise can not only drown out excess noise, but more helpfully as students concentrate, there is less noise because they’re concentrating. Neat trick, huh?
11. Venngage
Create interactive lessons, assess students on the fly, and see data and student responses in real-time. Students that can ask questions and receive feedback at any time are more likely to be engaged.
With so much focus being given to data analytics these days, data literacy is a useful skill for students to learn. Whether your students have collected their own data or they’ve collected it from other sources, being able to visualize their data in an infographic is a highly useful skill. Infographics appeal to both visual learners and textual learners. Venngage offers a selection of infographic templates that students can customize.
12. Prezi
Presentations are a core part of the curriculum but let’s face it, PowerPoint isn’t terribly engaging. Prezi allows students to create presentations that are more creative and exciting than was PP has to offer. Not only will this make the presentation creation process more interesting for students, but it will also make watching presentations more interesting as well. Plus, Prezi presentations are published publicly on students’ accounts, so their classmates can access them later to check their notes.
13. Trello
Because so many students are in the habit of multitasking, a good skill to teach them is how to organize and streamline their assignments. Trello is a free and super easy-to-use tool students can use to create workflow charts. Multiple students can be added to the same board; great for collaboration on projects. (See also a better list of ideas for project-based learning.)
14. Virtual Reality
For most classrooms, virtual reality still isn’t viable. Even if you do have a headset, you likely don’t have 30. But in terms of ‘student engagement,’ it’s difficult to improve on virtual reality. We use a Pico virtual reality headset for learning, for example.
Bonus
15. Cold Turkey
Students probably won’t love this one but it’s a useful tool you can use to mitigate the amount of multitasking students can do on their computers. Cold Turkey is a tool that allows you to block certain websites or the internet in general so that students can focus on their tasks. Even having students turn it on for half of a period for some focuses in-class writing time will make a difference in terms of their productivity.
Collaborative Annotation
1. Diigo
Diigo is a social bookmarking with excellent organization tools. The main value of Diigo is how it increases both students and teacher productivity while making it fun. Teachers can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks and access to premium functionalities for free (apply here).
You can create your personal library in the cloud for each of your courses, with links, pages, notes, pictures, and invite students so that they can access it and annotate. Students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can start using all the benefits that a Diigo group provides, such as group bookmarks and annotations, and group forums. Students can then collaborate and all read the same article and discuss synchronously right on the page.
You can also provide feedback to students’ work and writings by posting sticky notes and making screen captures and marking it up. Diigo provides powerful search capabilities.
You can find anything easily, even your own annotations. Diigo also provides excellent organization capabilities, with both tagging and lists, to suit different needs.
2. Evernote
Evernote is one of my favorite apps for learning. Is one powerful tool. Evernote is a note-taking app that can do much more than just taking notes. Like diigo, Evernote lets you save any content, forever. With Evernote you can do almost everything you want, is like a second brain. From a simple checklist to writing business plans, from class note-taking to academic research, from organizing your ideas to organizing your team.
Evernote is compatible with all kinds of devices and operating systems, and it is accessible also through the web app. You can share with your students complete notebooks, composed of unique resources, and organize it with tags. Guests are allowed to annotate and collaborate if you give them permission, or just read if you restrict it.
Evernote has a free version that’s quite complete for students. But the premium version is accessible and gives you the power to add notes to pdf files, do a text search on all your content, save and access revision history of your notes, send yourself emails with notes and integrate other apps like google drive. For a quick guide on how to use Evernote, you can read this article.
3. Notion
Notion started as a collaborative document editor. But you can do many other things. Students can use it to take and share notes in class or to organize their tasks with to-do lists.
But as an educator Notion can be the perfect workspace for your syllabi, notes, assignments, grades, and much more. You can create your course syllabi and share it with your students or create a wiki for the class.
Notion offers built-in templates that make student and teachers’ life easier. Students can find tools for building grade calculators, personal budget, job applications. While teachers can adopt ready-to-use templates for lesson plans, schedules, and class directory.
Notion is free for both students and educators. With an official institutional email address, you get access to unlimited block storage and no file upload limit.
4. Hypothes.is
Hypothes.is is not like any other annotation tool. If I have to be honest, is one of my favorites. Not only it’s a remarkable tool, but it is also open-source and completely free. Hypothes.is goes beyond traditional digital annotation, they enable sentence-level note-taking or discussion on classroom reading, news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation, and more. The beautiful about it is that it promotes web literacy and digital citizenship in students, more than any other app.
Educators need to create an account and then send the registration link to their students. Students will then be able to access the readings assignments and start annotating. You can also create private annotation groups. So, for example, if you want your students to work in smaller groups, you can send them special links. This link will also serve as the group home page with a list of members and texts annotated by the group. You can also link to a stream of annotations created by group members from the group home page.
Hypothes.is has a Chrome browser extension and is compatible with almost all Learning Management Systems (Canva, and Moodle included). For a quick guide on how to use it in your classroom, go here.
Visual collaboration and communication tools are also a brilliant way to make your online classes more dynamic and to motivate your students to be more active. There are several apps for doing this, but Mural and Miro are my favorite.
Visual Collaboration
5. Mural
A digital workspace for visual collaboration. As an educator, you can apply for a free facilitator account and start collaborating with other educators and students. With the educator account, you can have up to 10 team members (which can edit, facilitate and create murals) and 20 guests (only for collaborating to murals you give them access to) to your mural spaces. With Mural you can conduct virtual brain-storming sessions, use canvas layouts and frameworks designed by experts for different activities (business model, mind-mapping, empathy map, many others). you can break out your classroom in groups so that students’ teams can collaborate in different workspaces. You can apply for a Mural educator account here. Here you can find a tutorial on how to use Mural for education.
6. Miro
Similar to Mural, Miro is an app that acts as a virtual whiteboard for team collaboration. Educators and students can apply for a free education account that has the same functionalities as the pro version. Even if you don’t apply for the education account, you can create your free account and have up to 3 whiteboards to play with. You can invite an unlimited number of viewers and have small teams collaborating in your whiteboards. Otherwise, with the educational plan, you can invite and collaborate with as many students as you want and create unlimited whiteboards. To apply for an education account, you just need to apply here.
Engagement and gamification
Games are by far the most effective way to keep students engaged in learning, off and online. There is nothing more gratifying for learners than getting rewards and recognition when they work hard for it. Not only games are fun, but they facilitate learning. There are plenty of apps available for educators (and anyone else) for creating challenges, evaluations, and assignments while leaving the boring side apart. These two are my favorite.
7. Kahoot
The most famous interactive quiz platform is Kahoot, a free student-response that uses many gamification techniques to engage students’ participation and enhance learning. With Kahoot, you can both host live quizzes and self-paced challenges for out-of-class review. You can play Kahoot games in single mode or in team mode and offer plenty of fun features to stimulate students to play and learn. Kahoot offers a basic free plan where you can invite up to 50 players, host online games, play, and create as many Kahoots as you want and have assessments of reports ready to download. Premium plans start at 5 USD per month and you get more amazing features and more players.
8. Sli.do
With sli.do you can empower your students to ask questions, vote in polls, and be a part of the lecture by using a simple Q&A and polling tool. Sli.do is a great tool for promoting active learning in online classes. It allows you to involve your students in your lecture and give them the freedom to express their opinion via live polls, quizzes, brainstorming. The possibilities are vast.
- With polls, you can learn if your lecture’s content resonates with your students. You can also use them to drive meaningful discussions in your class.
- Use quizzes to find out how much your students remember from your lectures. Use them to recap the content from the last lecture. Or motivate your students to pay attention during your lecture by hosting a quiz at the end.
- Use the questions feature to collect students’ questions throughout your lecture and address them as they come in or in a dedicated Q&A session at the end of your class. You and your students can upvote and provide their answers in real-time, making peer-learning possible.
Another awesome feature is the switcher app. With Slido Switcher, you can display polls or questions on top of your presentation using your smartphone as a remote control. Whether you use PowerPoint, Keynote, or Prezi, our Switcher app allows you to switch seamlessly between your presentation and Slido.
Sli.do offers an education package starting at $5 per month. But you can also use the free version for free for up to 100 participants.
9. Factile
Have you ever played jeopardy? Well, Factile is a free learning platform that lets teachers create engaging Jeopardy-style quiz games for the classroom. You can create and personalize your own game boards or use pre-made quizzes shared by the community. With Factile you can either host jeopardy games, regular multiple choice quizzes, memory games, and create study flashcards to improve students’ learning proficiency. As Kahoot, you can play Factile in teams or individually. With the free version you can create up to 5 teams for each game and you can host up to 3 games. For as little at 5 USD per month, you can play and create as many games as you want and have over 50 teams. The premium account offers other amazing features like buzzer mode, play memory and choice games, play, and share flashcards.
Other great free apps for quizzes and assessments are quizziz and quizlet.
Interactive Activities
Online assessment and homework need not be boring. There are plenty of tools you can use to overcome the physical distancing and the lack of face-to-face interaction between you and your students. Collaboration and social co-creation are possible online thanks to technology. These are my favorite/
10. Wakelet
A free platform that allows you to curate and organize content from different platforms to save and share with students, colleagues, and friends. You need to create a collection — something like hashtags topics on Instagram — and students can contribute to adding text, pdf, videos, URLs, images, and Flipgrid shorts. These are brilliant ways for students to express their learning. Apart from this, the teacher can encourage creativity among the learners by inviting students to approach the assessment the way they want to. The idea behind Wakelet is to curate content like you will do for blogs (like Medium) or magazines. You can synthesize a bunch of different content, filter out the noise, and keep what is valuable in one sole collection to better communicate about a specific concept or topic. Wakalet is completely free and its potential is amazing.
11. Flipgrid
Flipgrid is a free social learning app to create and share short and exceptional videos. As an educator, you have free access to the app and you can create different grids — classrooms — and topics of discussion. Each grid has a unique code that you can share with your students so they can access the topics and the videos being posted by the professors and classmates. It is a magnificent tool for reflective learning and for building solid learning communities within your classes. As an educator you can post discussion prompts and students may respond with short videos, whether they are learning in class or at home. Flipgrid is completely free. For more info on how to use it, read the beginner’s guide here.
Backchannel discussion
Backchannel discussions are a great way for learners to have an on-topic conversation during a lecture. It is an effective way to keep your students engaged during an online session and continue the conversation afterward.
Unlike quiz tools like Kahoot, backchannels are not based on competition or gamification. The aim is not to test students’ knowledge. Instead, a backchannel is an informal way for students to interact with the educator and their classmates in the form of an online forum designed to complement classroom activity.
12. Slack
Initially conceived for business team communication and project management, slack can also be an outstanding tool for education. From planning and teaching curriculum to managing student services, slack offers amazing functionalities for both students and educators. You can create one workspace for each course, each with a set of channels for classroom work, discussion, group projects, and office hours. Students can use channels to post clarifying questions and comments throughout the lesson, and their classmates can use emoji reactions to second questions or show support for comments. Slack is compatible with Zoom, so when running a virtual classroom on Zoom you can directly access slack channels and questions. You can use threads to organize smaller group discussions around specific topics during the class. Slack is free, but for a better experience and more control over your interactions, and data premium plan is a better option. Slack offers 85% discount on the premium plan to education institutions. You can apply here.
13. Padlet
Padlet is a productivity software and we are pretty keen on making your work life easier. It’s essentially an online bulletin board, something like a notice board. It is an outstanding tool for making classes more interactive as it has a wide range of features such as sharing and collaborating documents, videos, post. But the best of it is their Backchannel option.
Padlet Backchannel provides a familiar messaging interface for both synchronous and asynchronous class discussions. You can use Padlet for student conversations during a lecture, for brainstorming ideas, or for Q&A session. You can make your Backchannels private, password-protected, secret, or fully public. You can also make them read-only or add admins. Another exceptional functionality is their Profanity filter that replaces bad words with emojis. You can also turn on discussion moderation and approve all messages before they show up for other readers.
While Padlet is not for free, it is still accessible at 99$/year per educator and includes unlimited student accounts.
Video conferencing and virtual classroom
Video conferencing is one of the best ways to get in touch with your students remotely. It’s a brilliant tool for having engaging conversations and lectures where you need interaction and peer discussion.
14. Zoom
The most common software for videoconferencing used by businesses and educators. Zoom has a freemium service. It’s great for hosting webinars, meetings, group collaborations, and calls. With a free account, you can invite up to 100 participants, have face-to-face interviews, and up to 40 minutes of group conference. With the current pandemic situation, Zoom has removed the 40 minute limit for educators. You just need to create an account with your institutional email address.
15. BigBlueButton
An alternative open source web conferencing system for online learning. The goal of the project is to provide remote students with a high-quality online learning experience. BigBlueButton is amazing because you can have the same Zoom pro functionalities for free. The software is really user-friendly. BBB has a whiteboard that you can share with your participants, you can breakout rooms for team collaboration and create polls during your virtual lecture. Here you can find a user guide on how to use.
Conclusion
We live in the era of social media. Nearly every student uses Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram in some form or another. So it makes sense to make them an integral part of your class, right? And this is where social media tools can help you. By using social media tools in your classroom, you can increase engagement between students and teachers.