With our online teaching tools, you’ll create a highly engaging classroom for your students. You can present lessons and demonstrate ideas visually with our easy-to-use whiteboard, which allows you to write or draw to explain concepts. Our course management system lets you schedule assignments, post resources and more.
Online teaching tools are not only the future of education — they’re probably the present, too. No matter what subject you teach or which grade level, there are a plethora of wonderful online teaching tools available to help you out. It’s just up to you to decide which ones to start with!
Maybe you’re just starting, or maybe you’ve been using these tools for a while. I’d like to share with you 5 of the best online teaching tools out there. These are the ones that I use on a regular basis and find extremely useful. If you are new to online teaching and are looking for your first online tool, be sure to give these a go!
Teaching online with effective tools is not an easy task. That said, it’s necessary that we teach online. With so many online tools to teach online, students can feel overwhelmed with just too many options and not enough content to help them learn a topic at leisure. Here are some effective online tools for online teaching which are my favorites.
Enhancing Learning: Tools For The Digital Classroom
There is certainly no shortage of tech-based tools to use in the classroom. In this article we’ll examine some of the best, focusing specifically on those that are designed for encouraging, enhancing, and managing learning.
A Web Whiteboard App
AWW App is the perfect solution for teachers that are used to having a board to write on during class. This is a digital whiteboard where teachers can annotate much like on a regular board.
The integration between AWW and Zoom makes it easier than ever to teach a class online. You can also import PDF and PowerPoint files into AWW.
This app is great for teachers that enjoy explaining things by showing how it’s done.
The boards can be pre-created before a lesson or written on during the lecture. The settings permit students to collaborate or “come up to the board.”
Ted Talks
Ted Talks are a great resource for online teaching. We wouldn’t exactly call it a tool, but more of a repository.
Ted’s website offers videos of 18-minute speeches by influential speakers on a variety of topics. There are even some Ted talks by kids, which can be greatly inspiring for students.
Best of all, every talk is free to include in lessons. The videos can be embedded or shared with a link. They’re easy to incorporate with any LMS.
Dialpad
Dialpad has a VoIP for education solution that provides an easy to use application for schools where teachers & students can meet, text, chat, and interact online.
Students can engage with teachers within virtual classrooms using screen sharing, whiteboarding, and chat features. Teachers can also set office hours, share class recordings, and connect with the faculty all within the same platform.
Dialpad is accessible on a variety of devices, including tablets, smartphones, computers, and laptops. Using Dialpad helps to reduce IT overhead for schools, and removes the requirement for hardware.
Teachers can meet students remotely, and create online classes instantly from anywhere in the world. They can also send out bulk SMS messages to check in with students on assignments, send updates, and announcements. Schools can set up advanced call routing rules for students to reach the correct department or desk, so teachers never have to worry about missing important phone calls.
There are so many features available on Dialpad, that we couldn’t even fit all of them here. For teachers interested in an all-in-one application, Dialpad offers a free 14 day trial.
LightSail
One of the most challenging things to keep up with is your students’ literacy progress. This is true both online and in face-to-face classrooms.
LightSail is a program that has already been showing positive results in classrooms. Now, with the spread of online learning, their team has adapted to educative solutions provided.
The LightSail app provides students with a variety of reading material to improve their literacy. The app tracks how much each student reads and how they are improving.
Teachers can create lesson plans around what their students enjoy reading, be it a book, or a website. Everything the student reads can be turned into a learning opportunity.
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.
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.
Boom Cards
Boom Cards are self-checking interactive activities that give students real-time feedback on their responses.
Here’s how they work:
- You create the Boom Cards in advance or use pre-created decks from other teachers
- You use the fast play option (for free) and get a link to send to students
- Your students are shown one question at a time and given real-time feedback on their answer
- They can correct themselves or simply discard the card
- You can also differentiate instruction with Boom Cards and assign certain cards to certain students
You can only use the fast play option with the free version and you will not be able to track progress but you can upgrade at any time under different price packages.
I love the idea of Boom Cards for a creative way to assess students where they won’t even realize they are learning!
Nearpod
Nearpod allows teachers to make any lesson interactive. Take those boring worksheets and make them fun and engaging.
Or, pull in videos and other interactive content into your Nearpod lesson.
Let’s check out how it works:
- Jump over to Nearpod and create a free account.
- Browse Nearpod’s thousands of lessons in the Nearpod Library or create your own.
- Once you create your own lesson you just add slides like you would in any presentation software.
- The difference is that instead of just adding text or images (which you still can), nearpod has lots of other fun options like quizzes, polls, and games to make it fun.
- You give your students a code to enter and then you are ready to go!
The difference between Nearpod’s free and paid version is the amount of storage you get and the number of students that can join at one time.
Remind
A big part of school education is communicating with both students and parents. This is no different when the learning is being done online.
The Remind App is an advanced messaging system that works in three different ways:
- Reminders for upcoming lessons or due dates of projects and tests
- Email messaging with students and parents
- Direct messaging with parents of students
The main feature of Remind is that all notifications are sent to mobile devices, making it easier for teachers to interact with students and parents.
The app can be integrated with Google Classroom and Google Drive for easy access to class materials. Also, it’s easy to send links to Zoom meetings and webinars.
Teachers can set up office hours for timely messaging and control over their private lives.
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.
Asana
Asana is your personal teaching secretary all in one powerful app that gives you control over your tasks, projects and to-do lists.
Essentially, Asana is a productivity management solution for teams, individuals or anyone that needs more control over their tasks.
Teachers will enjoy Asana for a number of reasons.
Firstly, from a simple angle of gaining control over the multitude of to-do’s and projects that teachers need to manage, this app will do it all.
Some ways that teachers can use Asana in their teaching life can include:
- Creating lesson plan tasks with manageable subtasks that have deadlines
- Managing students’ information, progress and other important details
- Helping with teams of teachers to manage projects that need to be completed
- Create online lesson plans that allow teachers to see what parts of the lesson were and weren’t completed
This app is great for teachers in brick-and-mortar schools as well as online teachers who need to gain control over their schedule by focusing on what matters each day.
Additionally, if you are a teacherpreneur building your own online teaching business, Asana will be your go-to place to make sure that everything in your business is running smoothly.
With the free account, teachers will be able to create projects and tasks through a variety of different layouts.
What Are Your Favorite Online Teaching Tools?
Teaching online in a virtual classroom is easier than it seems—the difficult part is getting used to it. Once you have the tools you need to be efficient and engaging, every lesson is easier than the one before it.
Most of the online teaching tools in this list can be used with Visme. Simply upload your Visme creations to your preferred tool and you’ve got the perfect combination.
Conclusion
Online teaching tools can be a tremendous help for online teachers. At one time, online teaching was so new that there really weren’t any applications, tools and programs that could help online teachers improve their classes.
Technology is integral to the world in which we live. Students and learners today are digitally-savvy, but they are also online all the time. There is a lot that you can do to engage them more by making use of online technology. In fact, there are online education tools that can help you enhance your teaching methods. Whether you’re writing a blog post, managing your Facebook page, or meeting with a family member online, it’s important to be aware of some of the tools available to help keep you safe and secure online.