If you’re a teacher, you’re already doing a lot, but luckily there are many tools available to make your job a little bit easier. Teaching tools can help with everything from creating quizzes to promoting good behavior, and many educators find them incredibly useful. These teaching tools can be used to help you both in and out of the classroom.
Here is the list of online teaching tools that helps to make your job easier and your students time in class more effective.
- 1. Remind
- 2. Quizizz
- 3. Baamboozle
- 4. Edmodo
- 5. Quill
- 6. Google Slides
- 7. Math Learning Center
- 8. FlipGrid
- 9. Peardeck
1. Remind
Remind is a teaching aid that makes it easier for teachers to communicate with students and parents. Once you sign up, you can send out class announcements, let people know what times you’re available for extra help, and send home updates (with read receipts). Remind makes it easy to keep everyone up-to-date.
2. Quizizz
Quizizz is a free online learning game site that is incredibly easy to use, has zillions of already-made games on just about every topic that are fun activities for reinforcement and formative assessment, and has recently added a simplified Nearpod-like feature (for those of you familiar with that popular tool) called student-paced “Lessons.” My students love playing Quizizz games in teams divided into separate Zoom breakout rooms. Unlike other game sites, students can see the question and the possible answers on the same screen and don’t have to split them into two.
3. Baamboozle
Baamboozle is another free online game site. Its main advantage is that it’s set up so that students can play online in teams, but they don’t have to go into different breakout rooms. In other words, students can select a question to answer and talk among themselves in front of others to determine the correct answer (other students are waiting for their turn to choose another question). If that explanation is a bit confusing, it will be very clear once you go to the site itself.
4. Edmodo
This teaching tool allows educators to share lesson plans, assignments, and other resources with each other. It also gives them a way to communicate with both students and parents or to set up an online classroom discussion among students. Students and parents can only join the site if they are invited by a teacher. Once they join you can communicate with them using a chat feature that looks similar to Facebook Messenger.
5. Quill
Quill is a free and amazing site where students can learn grammar in a nonpainful way. I use it with my English-language-learner classes, but students of all English-proficiency levels would find it helpful. I love that after periodic “diagnostics,” it recommends which exercises students should move onto for additional practice.
6. Google Slides
This quintessential, simple, and free tool gives teachers the security and flexibility to create interactive activities while releasing ownership to the students. By inviting students to the shared slide in edit mode, and practicing netiquette norms, students can type ideas into text boxes, paste images that express their opinions, manipulate game pieces, and insert screen shots of their work from third-party apps. The pedagogical magic is revealed when teachers and students can observe and modify each other’s responses, in real time.
7. Math Learning Center
This virtual manipulative website is a staple in mathematics classrooms where students interact with familiar manipulatives such as base 10 blocks. Teachers can customize the site by creating problems, saving templates, and sharing private links with students. The best part is that the tools encourage flexible thinking as students explore multiple ways to model their understanding.
8. FlipGrid
You might be familiar with this website’s ability to capture short videos of students’ responses, but what puts it in another league is the ability for back and forth video dialogue between students.
This gives access to more students and opens possibilities for collaboration. A kindergarten student can count toys over video, and their friends can ask follow-up questions such as, “How many are pink?” and then upload a video response. English- and world-language learners can practice new speaking skills while previewing and editing their video responses as they master pronunciation. This tool gives students the ability to engage in rich peer-to-peer collaboration.
9. Peardeck
Peardeck -- is one of the mainstays of my synchronous classes. Engagement is in real time and responses from all students are immediately visible. The add-on tool is available in Google Slides, and Peardeck tools may be added to individual Slides. Another great feature is that the Peardeck platform saves class sessions. Teachers may revisit student responses and use them as formative assessments.
If you are new to Peardeck, students log in through joinpd.com and with a code created for each deck. After all students have logged in, the teacher clicks “start lesson.” The students respond using various tools like polls, drawing tools for matching, multiple-choice answers, and free response fill-in-the-blank. Students’ names are anonymous, but teachers may check student names later in the saved Peardeck session on the Peardeck site. (In a synchronous lesson, the Peardeck is screen-shared.)
Trending Topics
