This year you might find yourself in the virtual classroom. Today I am sharing some tools for teaching online. These will hopefully be beneficial and make your life a little easier.
Interactive Lessons
Nearpod is a great resource for interactive lessons across devices. It works with a few LMS (Google Classroom, Canvas, etc). You can assign quizzes, polls, virtual field trips, live lessons, student led lessons, and so much more! The basic version is free. There are pre-made lessons available as well so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Collaborative Note Taking
Bitpaper is a collaborative and interactive whiteboard. There are so many uses for this tool in the virtual classroom, but especially for working out math problems. This is a paid site, but there is a free student version. You can invite your students to view the note taking while teaching your lesson by sharing the link.
GitMind is similar to Bitpaper, but this site is for mind mapping. It is free and there are tons of ways to use this in the virtual classroom. There is a variety of different graphic organizers that you can create on the website.
Google Docs is a great tool for collaborative note taking. A doc can be created and students can share their notes. A “perfect” note can be created from the notes and shared out to the class. Docs is also a great tool for online discussions, group work, and planning. Visit docs.google.com to get started!
Tools for Assessment
Socrative is a website/app that is great for virtual assessment during distance learning. You can assign quick questions, quizzes, exit tickets, and so much more. There is a free version as well as tiered paid plans.
Edulastic is another great website for assessment. There are Common Core and state standards aligned assessments that you can assign to your students for practice. You can also sync to Google Classroom to cut down on student log ins which is a huge plus!
Interactive Games for Distance Learning
Want to play games as a class? Online learning has made this harder, but not impossible. With Kahoot you can! The basic version is free. The teacher can share the screen on video with the students who answer the questions. The fastest correct answer gets the most points. You can create your own games or use games created by other teachers.
Do you have any tools for teaching online I didn’t mention here? Drop them in the comments!
More Distance Learning Resources
If you’re looking for more blog posts on distance learning make sure to check these out:
