The use of technology in teaching has changed drastically in the last few decades and has increased exponentially in recent years. Digital learning has become a huge part of everyday teaching, even now that students have returned to the classroom.

There are many online learning tools available to help improve the virtual learning experience for both teachers and students and while everyone has heard of Microsoft Teams and Zoom, there are some brilliant lesser-known tools that you will want to add to your teaching toolkit.  Some of these digital learning tools are designed to improve your productivity, while others will elevate your remote lessons and make them more engaging for students. Read on to discover how to level up your virtual lessons. 

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Learning Management Systems

Educate Me

Educate Me is an easy-to-use learning management system that makes organizing online learning simple for both you and your students. 

Within Educate Me, you can set up your students into their classes, and interact directly with the class as a group. This means you can set homework tasks, revision exercises, and reminders, and students can respond to these messages to confirm they have read them. You can also set assignments for them to complete online, and track the whole class’s progress automatically. This can be a huge time-saver compared to traditional paper assessments, which have to be graded by you. 

Pupil engagement and attendance are tracked automatically, allowing you to see at a glance who may be falling behind. 

Live lessons are easy to conduct, with straightforward Zoom integration, and sessions are automatically recorded and stored to allow students to catch up in their own time. 

Eduflow

Eduflow is a learning management system designed to make online learning as engaging and collaborative as possible. It supports a wide variety of content types including video and discussion boards and encourages students to create their own content.  It has a strong focus on teacher and peer feedback as well as collaborative learning. 

You can easily create an attractive, engaging course from within the platform using their drag-and-drop tools, and assignments can be automatically graded to save you time. 

The software can be accessed on any device and can be integrated with many other apps, including Zoom and Microsoft Teams. 

Online Lesson Planning Resources

Teach Simple

Using online learning tools is a great way to cut down on time spent grading and tracking assessments, but even more time can be saved by using high-quality, ready-made resources to take your digital teaching to the next level. With a Teach Simple subscription, you can access tens of thousands of educational resources, which are created and vetted by experienced teachers. 

For a low monthly fee, you can download as many worksheets, lesson plans, and interactive activities as you wish. These materials are easily tailored to suit your virtual lessons, and you have the reassurance of knowing they are all aligned with education standards. 

Activities are available for all grades, from Kindergarten to Senior High, and cover every subject you can think of. 

A Teach Simple subscription will also benefit your in-class teaching and allow you to create engaging, stimulating lessons with very little effort.

Ted-Ed

TedEd is an excellent resource to complement your online lessons, with hundreds of videos and animations designed to be incorporated into your lessons. It is the education arm of the TED platform, with content appropriate and focused toward education. Videos must meet very high standards to gain the TED logo, so as teachers, we can be confident that the videos our classes are watching will be of the highest quality and factually accurate. 

TedEd is ideal for parts of a course that are hard to understand, as the award-winning videos are designed to make difficult concepts more engaging. 

A brilliant feature of TedEd is the ability to create entire lessons around the video, by adding personalized discussion questions alongside the video, divided into four categories: watch, think, dig deeper, and discuss. 

TedEd can also be easily integrated with Google Classroom, which is a big plus if you already use it for your online teaching. 

Digital Organization Tools

Live Binders

If you have been teaching for more than 10 years, you likely started your career with a slightly unhealthy obsession with 3-ring binders! As a teacher, they were the ultimate, colorful way to keep yourself organized for each class and keep your lesson plans and worksheets in order. Plus, they looked so fabulous stacked on the shelf, beautifully organized, and color-coded!

Live Binders takes the benefits of 3-ring binders and modernizes them for the digital age. It allows you to keep resources organized and easily accessible for online learning.  It can be used to collaborate between teachers or to organize your files to share with your class. Within each binder, you can store class materials, videos, PowerPoints, links to websites and so much more. 

Students can create their own binders and use them for project-based work and can comment on their classmates’ binders, making peer assessment straightforward and fun. 

If you were a big fan of ring binders, but want a more environmentally friendly option, Live Binders is the perfect solution!

AnyDo

If you have switched to online learning or are doing blended learning with your classes, you will have even more tasks to keep on top of in your already-packed teaching schedule. Having a program to help keep you organized is crucial, and AnyDo is a great option. It is a calendar, to-do list, and organizer all in one app. 

Though not specifically designed for teaching, AnyDo will help you to plan your online and classroom lessons as well as collaborate with other teachers. Tasks can be color-coded for different goals and can be easily dragged from one list to another. 

You can also encourage your students to use the app to get themselves organized when working from home. 

Recreate the Classroom Environment Online

Web Whiteboard

If virtual learning has you missing your whiteboard, this is the app for you. You can use it for anything you would use your classroom board for, and so much more.  You can write, highlight, type, and add sticky notes and web links. The software is easy to use and students can take part in collaborative activities such as quizzes or creating mindmaps. 

Using Web Whiteboard will keep your students engaged in active learning, rather than simply watching a video of you teaching. It can also be used in the classroom during cooperative learning and for class projects. 

Mote

Mote is a unique tool that will save you a huge amount of time in both in-person and online teaching. It allows you to give audio feedback on an assignment rather than traditional written comments. Since talking can be up to seven times faster than typing, you can save hours of time each month by dictating your feedback instead of typing it.  Audio also allows you to convey emotion and empathy in a way that text does not, allowing you to connect with students even when you are not in the same room as them. 

Mote is a Chrome extension, allowing you to make audio notes on any Google document or inside Google Classroom. It also offers transcription of voice-to-text and translation into over 40 languages.

Padlet

Interactive bulletin boards in your classroom are a great way to get students thinking, engaged, and excited about a topic. During online learning, you can recreate the bulletin boards from your classroom using Padlet. Incredibly easy to use, this visual software allows you to make up the initial board and your class can then add to it in real time. You can post images, videos, links to websites, and virtually any other digital link you could think of, making it even more interactive than your classroom bulletin board. 

Students can access Padlet on any device and it can be used in a classroom environment too for collaborative learning. 

Fun Tools to Enhance Your Lessons

Kahoot!

Kahoot! is a fun, energetic quiz game that your students will love playing both in class and remotely. It can be linked up with video conferencing using Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet, or students can play in their own time. 

Students can play against the clock for a high-paced showdown, or in untimed challenge mode to test accuracy rather than speed. 

Kahoot! is extremely versatile, allowing you to use pre-made tests or write your own questions entirely, including true/false, multiple choice, and fill-in-the-blanks. 

Kahoot is free to use but also has a premium option with enhanced features.

We all know that our students learn better when they are engaged, and adding Kahoot! to your online lessons is a great way to make sure of it! 

Canva

Canva is a graphic design program that has so many uses for teachers, including as an online learning tool. If you are assigning visual projects, such as posters and presentations, Canva is the perfect solution, making design simple for even younger learners. Their drag-and-drop canvas and multitude of templates make it extremely easy for students to create eye-catching visuals to present their work. 

You can collaborate with students on a project, meaning you can make changes and leave comments on their work, which they can see in real-time. All work on Canva is auto-saved, meaning you don’t need to worry about students losing precious work. 

Canva Pro is free to educators, so be sure to sign up with your school email. As a teacher, discovering Canva for the first time is like coming across a new stationery store! Once you’ve tried it, I guarantee you will use it for everything in your classroom, from rewards charts to lesson plans! 

Keep the Score

A great way to motivate students during remote learning is to continue to have a ‘scoreboard’ system like you have in your classroom, or to introduce one if you don’t already use it. You can keep track of virtually anything that can be easily measured, such as handing in homework assignments on time, giving peer feedback on projects, or improving their test grades.

You can choose to score students individually or in teams and can have short leaderboards that only last a week, or ongoing competitions that continue throughout the term.

Keep The Score is a great digital classroom scoreboard and is simple to set up and use. It even has a variety of themes for you to choose from, with Harry Potter House Points being a popular choice. While we wouldn’t recommend that surviving a round of Wizards’ Chess should be a target (spoiler alert!), most students will be familiar enough with the books for it to add a bit of fun.

Wheel of Names

As a young, enthusiastic teacher (remember those days?!) you may have used popsicle sticks with students’ names to randomly select pupils to answer questions and participate in activities. This avoids the common situation of one or two students in each class answering all the questions and means each student has to pay attention and think of an answer in case they are chosen.

Wheel of Names is an excellent digital version of this method, allowing you to enter your class’s names into the wheel and spin it – Wheel of Fortune style – to select a student to answer. You can create a different wheel for each class, and confetti explodes with a round of applause as a celebration whenever a student is chosen. From experience, your class will love using this, and unlike the lolly sticks, where they will dread being picked, they will all sit in anticipation as you spin the wheel, hoping it lands on their name!

Final Thoughts

In reality, digital learning is here to stay and is likely to increase further in the coming years. As a teacher, embracing the technology involved and learning to use online learning tools will make your teaching life easier, both for digital and in-class learning. Have a go with some of the above resources to make your lessons more engaging, and see the benefits for both you and your classes.