You can’t teach as though we’re still in the 19th century. Keeping up to date with the latest tech tools is an essential part of being a teacher.
Being at the forefront of technology ensures you engage your students and give them a more pleasant experience overall. So without further ado, here are six tools that have to be in your arsenal to make 2019 a productive year.
Nearpod
Nearpod has a huge body of knowledge and is at the forefront of technology. It has over a thousand engaging lessons on most subjects. This makes your job this much easier. Sure, you won’t forget about the curriculum and replace it with Nearpod, but it’s a substantial bonus to the regular classes.
The best thing about it allows for truly interactive lessons. For instance, Nearpod VR can be integrated with cheap VR headsets like Google Cardboard for VR classes. Do you think your students will be bored with that type of class?
Equity Maps
Discussions are a great way of learning. They’ve been around since the times when Plato would go on a walk with his students, teaching them through dialogue.
Students are very engaged and interested in the outcome. Discussions are way ahead of the conventional sit-and-cram technique.
Yet, monitoring and assessing discussions is a hard task to tackle. When the speaker changes every minute, and new ideas are thrown about like how potatoes, it’s difficult to give each one a grade.
Equity Maps helps you do that. You create a seating chart and mark how many students are participating in a given discussion. As the class starts, you can tap on students’ buttons to record how long did they speak, or tap other buttons to record periods of silence or chaos.
You can even record the whole thing on audio to review it later. As the class finishes, you get to see the statistics: how many participants were there, who were the most active ones, and other things.
ProWritingAid
Are you tired of browsing through endless pages of student’s works pasting commas and changing articles? What if you let them do it themselves?
ProWritingAid lets you do just that. It is an advanced grammar checker that does the dirty work for you. Use it to check student papers faster, or as a part of self-learning efforts. The latter is especially good for adult ESL learners.
This tool can give you statistics on such things as how many clichés do you use, how readable your text is, does your writing include too many adverbs, etc. Basically, ProWritingAid is Elements of Style, fitted into an app.
Learn Around The World
Learn Around The World (LATW) is a tool that takes advantage of the world’s connectedness. It brings together people from all over the world into a global learning environment.
Let’s say your students are learning about South Korea. Showing them footage of the country, telling about their customs or economy is one thing. But if you get your students a visual field trip on the streets of Seoul and then let them ask locals questions about the country, it just takes the education to a new level.
Buncee
The premise of Buncee is as simple as it gets: create narrated presentations for your students. The implications of this formula are very important for the learning process.
With Buncee, you can easily prepare a body of knowledge for your students to explore. This can be the main goal of the curriculum or the interesting facts that go beyond it.
Either way, you end up with an engaging piece of information that students will love watching.
Remind
One of the most important stages of education is beyond the classroom. Without communication between teachers, students, parents, and the administration, no student can succeed.
But talking to parents can be a hassle, when you have to talk to one on Facebook, the other on Instagram, and the third one on WhatsApp. Remind brings them all in one app, making your work easier.
About the author
Connie Benton
Connie Benton is a passionate freelance writer and guest contributor. She writes about content marketing, business writing, and blogging.
