Being a good teacher requires a lot of effort and dedication to work. However, it might be daunting and frustrating sometimes. You might feel that you either constantly prepare for lessons trying to make your lessons interesting and useful, or you deal with the paperwork and check home tasks of your students at home in your free time. In such moments, you might think you do not have this free time for rest or some other important to your activities. Besides, you might not have inspiration for work at all.
Especially if you are struggling to find time for your self-development and growth in this eternal round of duties. If this is true to you, do not forget that there are online writing services that you might address to get some Ph.D. or MBA essay help. As a result, you will feel relieved and less stressed out.
If you still need to find more time in your schedule or you are looking for some source of inspiration, we have collected links that we hope will make your work more unusual.
These educational websites will help you have more productive lessons, reduce time spent on daily tasks, and expand opportunities for creativity and project work. Many of these resources will be of use to students and their parents as well. Finally, many of them are great to use for remote education, especially in a pandemic.
1. LearningApps
Using LearningApps, you can create exercises for students’ self-assessment, and the main plus is that everything in the app can be viewed in different languages. The service offers not only classic quizzes but also many other useful tools: fill in the blank spaces in the text, solve a crossword puzzle, build a chronological chain, find a place on the map, collect a puzzle, etc.
You can even create a video course in LearningApps! To do this, you add a video (from YouTube, for example) and, along the way, come up with some questions or other forms of assignments. The student watches a piece of the video, then it is paused, and the assignment needs to be done. The service’s main feature is that the teacher does not see how the student did the task. The exercises are mainly designed only for self-checking.
2. Kahoot
It’s a service that allows you to conduct interactive quizzes in the classroom. When a teacher verbally quizzes students, he or she can only hear the answers of a few students since there simply is not enough time to ask all of them.
By using Kahoot, teachers can quiz all students at once and know their weaknesses and strengths at a glance. The teacher creates the survey online, and students respond in class using their smartphones or computers. The teacher, along with the students, sees the response statistics and can see what problems they are having (or not having). You can use Kahoot not only to create surveys but also to administer questionnaires.
3. Quizizz
The service is just like Kahoot: the teacher creates a survey where students should answer the questions from their devices. However, here students cannot see each other’s answers. They work with the application individually while the teacher only sees the overall statistics. So if you want to eliminate the competitive element for some reason, use this service. The data obtained can be retrieved in Excel format.
4. Canva
Teachers often have to prepare illustrative material by themselves, and photo editor Canva can make this process way easier. For teachers, in particular, on the website, there are plenty of templates for presentations, lesson plans, tasks, posters, etc. For example, here, you can use an outline or a template for a brainstorming session, a school poster where your students or you personally could add a motivating quote and use it during the lesson, or you can create an infographic about the planets of the solar system. In Canva, you can quickly edit a photo, crop the image, or add some text.
5. Plickers
If you don’t like the idea of students’ smartphones, there is an alternative service for surveys in which only you will have a phone. You sign up at Plickers, come up with a survey (you can do one with several variants of answers or in the “true or false” format), and download the application to your phone. You need to print a set of unique QR codes for the students they will use to answer on the website.
How does it work? The teacher asks a question; the students have to pick up the QR code corresponding to the answer, and using the app, you scan their answers. All the statistics are collected at the service, and you are able to see at once who and how answered your questions.
6. Triventy
The main difference between this service and the previous one is that here students can create questions themselves. During the lesson, the teacher invites each student (or group of students) to come up with a question on the topic being studied, and at the end of the lesson, the whole class answers the questions they came up with themselves. Students can always take hints: remove two wrong answers or see how most of the classmates answered (if a student has trouble answering).
7. WeTransfer
It is a good service for uploading and sharing your videos, photos, or other files. It can be beneficial if you want to give your students more video/listening tasks.
8. Calendly
If you need to schedule personal or group meetings with some of your students, but you want to have the whole schedule in one place, you may use Calendly. You just choose time slots you are available for a meeting, create an event there, and share the link with your students. They will reserve meetings with you when it is suitable for them, but according to the timetable that you set in this app. As a result, you will not need to communicate personally with all of the students you have. It is a real time-saver.
These are just some of the sources that already proved helpful. So, look carefully and get inspired for your future lessons.
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