Technology has revolutionized teaching and learning. Lectures and seminars no longer have to be confined to the classroom.
Instructors and students now have a digital toolbox – ranging from mobile devices used to edit PDF and online courses. Let’s not forget digital textbooks.
With the rapid advancement of technology over the last 20 years, how students learn and teachers teach has changed. Statistics show that online learning increases retention rates by 25% to 60%.
Fortunately, there are many educational technology tools available today that can supplement your ability to bring new information to students.
Let’s look at some of these digital tools for learning.
PDF Editors
Managing file exchange is a crucial component of any online teaching process. File transfer with PDF tools ensures maximum cooperation and fast exchange among users.
Moreover, most PDF apps like LuminPDF have advanced tools to customize, sign, and share files. You can also use his PDF editor to compress and password-protect sensitive documents.
Canvas
Canvas is an online learning management system (LMS). Higher institutions, tutors, and students use it to access and manage remote teaching materials and develop learning skills.
Canvas contains important lecture and teaching tools. It is a dependable internet software that allows institutions to manage online teaching. Educators can use this tool to create and present material, which they can share with students remotely.
Calendly
Calendly is a scheduling app for appointments, meetings, and events. This tool allows users to visualize their schedules and plan their time better.
Calendly enables Zoom integration, which is an essential feature in remote learning apps today. With this feature, you can organize Zoom meetings and share the links with your students without unnecessary hassle.
Coursera
Coursera is a learning platform that allows students to enroll in courses and engage in lectures, with no consequences for score evaluation.
Students can also take classes for credit to improve their understanding of various subjects. In this way, Coursera serves as a supplement to educational tools for students, providing access to professional mentors and peers.
Google Classroom
Google Classroom is a set of teacher technology tools that permits them to create assignments, collect student work, and score them. Using school laptops, like Chromebooks, teachers and students share information in remote teaching effectively.
Since the pandemic started, Google Classroom has grown in popularity as more schools transition to online teaching and teachers implement paperless instruction.
With Classroom, you can work with Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites, Earth, Calendar, and Gmail, supplemented with Google Hangouts or Meet for live teaching and video conferencing.
Socrative
Socrative is a web-based, mobile-friendly tech tool for teachers to create quiz-style content and engage students through quick formative assessment questions or team competitions.
Students who are unlikely to raise their hands in class can respond digitally and anonymously.
Teachers also control what students see on the screen, such as percentages rather than individual responses.
Socrative provides teachers instant feedback and engagement from students.
Edmodo
Edmodo is a teaching tool that provides a restricted environment in which teachers and students enroll in digital classes. Users can communicate, interact, collaborate, and exchange educational material within structured activities.
Furthermore, Edmodo’s digital platform attracts users from the education sector. Edmodo provides a social networking environment where teachers and students create a user account to quickly publish their texts, notes, comments, and thoughts.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy is an online learning platform that focuses on video lectures, short readings, interactive quizzes (usually multiple choice), and discussion threads.
When you enroll in a course, you gain access to video lectures and other materials in that course, presented in chronological order.
A course on Khan Academy typically consists of units that contain lessons, and within the classes are videos, readings, and quizzes.
Khan Academy also personalizes education by allowing students to self-pace through lessons scaled to their current level of understanding. Learners on this platform can only progress once they have mastered a topic within a course.
At the moment, the platform offers several teacher resources available for remote teaching.
Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha is a unique engine for answering questions and providing knowledge.
The benefits of this app include instant solutions to math problems and performance analysis using its vast store of expert-level knowledge and algorithms.
Wolfram Alpha can also compute and present extensive data on various topics, ranging from shoe sizes to lottery odds and dinosaur comparisons. Wolfram Alpha is an invaluable educational technology tool that improves online teaching.
Video conferencing tools
Video conferencing tools engage audiences through visuals, interactive features, and synchronous communication.
Apps like Google Hangout are the popular free teaching tools in this category. These apps contain multiple futures to simplify online meetings and seminars.
Instead of simply emailing files to students or posting them on an online classroom portal, video conferencing allows teachers and students to share documents and files in real-time.
Another advantage of video conferencing is that participants can record the lecture or lesson for future use. While this recording feature is rarely used in middle and high school, college students use it as an online educational tool.
Some necessary video conferencing tools for online teaching includes:
- Google+ Hangout
Google+ is a simple teaching tool used for online teaching. The lovely thing about the app is that it is free and does not contain any ads. However, these advantages come at a cost: the platform can only admit groups of up to ten people.
- Adobe Connect
The Adobe Connect web conferencing software provides immersive online meeting experiences ranging from small group collaboration to large-scale webinars. Adobe Connect Webinars and Adobe Connect Learning include all the advantages of Adobe Connect Meetings.
- AnyMeeting
AnyMeeting provides web conferencing, video conferencing, conference call, and webinar services for a free or low-cost price. You can meet with up to 200 participants, create custom registration forms, send email invitations to your participants, hold private or public webinars, share anything on your screen, upload and transmit PowerPoint and PDFs, and much more with Any Meeting.
Conclusion
Due to the global pandemic, teachers and students engage in remote teaching. However, it mustn’t result in adverse outcomes. Instead, the learning process can be efficient and enjoyable with a plethora of online teacher tools to aid and facilitate studies. Every educational process has a solution, from content creation and presentation to video communication and quizzing platforms. Education can thrive in any environment with the help of a simple set of educational technology tools, a PDF editor, and a video conferencing app.