You want to give your students the best as a teacher, but it can feel very tiring, especially when you have to combine paperwork with actual teaching. There has to be a way to make your life easy – a less-exhausting way to engage students and parents online while having enough time on your hands to do other non-teaching activities.
Here are ten tools for teaching online that can make your life a lot easier. Some of these tools are free, while others can be assessed for a monthly subscription.
1. Quickey
Let’s kick off with Quickey – one of the brilliant tools for teaching that most educators didn’t see coming!
Staring at a stack of students’ scripts waiting to be marked and graded can knock the wind out of you! But apps like Quickey can literally do all the marking for you. And you don’t even need an internet connection to do this. All you need is a mobile phone and your student’s papers.
2. ThinkWave
Thinkwave is a free online tool for tracking students’ grades and reporting progress to parents. With Thinkwave, teachers can quickly produce students’ reports in granular styles, including adding header, logo, images, bells, and whistles. Students can upload their assignments online so that teachers can have instant access to them.
Online tools for teaching don’t get any simpler than Thinkwave. The cloud-based program comes with a built-in blog that allows teachers, parents, and students to share ideas, news, and other specific postings for groups.
3. Remind
Remind is an online tool that takes the paperwork load off of your shoulders. The website is designed to simplify two-way communication between teachers and students. The tool sends timely reminders to students and parents about any vital information you want to send across.
Messages are sent through text and emails without disclosing your personal details. You can also send files that are synced to your Google account. If anyone in your class or community knows how to text, they can also use this tool.
4. Schoology
Schoology is a renowned Learning Management System (LMS) and social network with an interface that looks like Facebook. This tool significantly cuts down administrative tasks through its several features, including attendance tracker, online distribution and collection of assignments, automatic and instant score updates, and collaborative learning.
5. Socrative
Socrative is a cloud-based tool designed to help teachers test students’ understanding of a topic in real-time. Mini-quizzes can include true-false, multiple-choice, open-ended short response, or graded short answers.
Socrative provides educators with timely and valuable feedback with its “on-the-fly” appraisal method. This saves teachers the headache of carrying on with teaching only to start from scratch because students didn’t understand what has been taught.
6. Newsela
Newsela is a website that gives you access to tons of reading materials that you can make available to your students. This teaching tool is especially useful for English Teachers who are looking for great articles for their class, as the materials are sought from great sources such as the BBC, The Guardian, and Time Magazine.
You can set assignments in Newsela using open-ended questions or multiple-choice questions, and these are automatically marked. But the unique thing about Newsela is its adjustable Lexile feature.
It allows teachers to choose readability levels for different students based on their reading capabilities. Text can be simplified for those struggling or made complex for more confident students.
7. TurnItIn
TurnItIn is an interactive tool that helps educators analyze the quality and authenticity of internet sources used in students’ researches. It uses the Source Educational Evaluation Rubric (SEER) to assess sites. Each website or material cited in a student’s work can be evaluated based on originality, quality, educational value, authority, and originality.
TurnItIn saves you all the time and effort used in manually tracking each internet source in your students’ work.
8. Wolfram Alpha
Admittedly, you can’t be on you’re A-game at all times. Even you, too, need help once in a while, which is why Wolfram Alpha is the tool you need when you want to calculate something, but your brain seems to be on snooze. It is also a great research tool as it can give you quick answers to a wide range of topics from a broad field of knowledge.
9. Report Comment Bank
It can be draining for you as a teacher when they have to write a school report, but you are simply not at the top of your game. Report Comment Bank is one of those tools for teaching that can make your life easy and help you get through such “down” days quickly by providing you with a wide range of preset reports or comments to choose from.
This easy-to-use online teaching tool comes with over two hundred and sixty thousand preset comments carefully structured into subjects and topics. You can choose and customize comments for individual students. All comments are editable so that you give more specific feedback.
10. Edmodo
Edmodo brings the idea of social networking into the online learning environment. Your students will love this superb social e-learning platform, as it helps them find their voice and become more confident. Parents, too, will find the regular updates on this platform useful as it helps them to keep track of their children’s progress.
Besides posting assignments, teachers can also share a library of resources on the platform, hold opinion polls, and engage students in class discussions. The app is available for download on Android and iOS devices.
In Closing
Advancement in technology has made it possible to churn out various types of online apps aimed at easing educators’ burdens. And the fact is that many more tools are still being developed.
While there are probably hundreds of online tools for teaching out there, you will find the ones on this list really helpful in easing your workload. These tools have been carefully selected because they are quite easy to use, whether they are cloud-based or require a download.
