Digital Tools for Teachers
Updated: Apr 21, 2021
<The images/ videos/ partial content are from the internet. These materials are for educational reference only. >
Teachers’ supporting and augmenting of their students’ learning can at times seem daunting with a constant plethora of new sites, apps and resources constantly emerging whilst many of the trusted resources we have used in the past can quickly seem outdated or disappear altogether.
READING TOOLS
Reading tools include a range of tools and resources to help you develop your students’ reading skills. These range from tools to assist with vocabulary whilst reading to resources with a wide range of ready-made graded authentic and semi authentic content to help engage and motivate your students both at home and in the classroom.
save quotes or images from websites during online research
to assist students’ reading and to build vocabulary
to find semi authentic content for lower levels
to provide news stories as the basis for language learning
to create reading activities based around any text
To help develop reading and comprehension skills
To provide ready reading activities, questions for the texts as well as vocabulary support.
to provide a range of reading texts at different levels, interactive online quizzes, and audio recordings of the texts
to assist students with the reading of more challenging web based texts
to annotate web based texts with sticky notes, highlighting, underlining and a range of other features
WRITING TOOLS
Writing tools include a range of resources to help you develop your students’ digital writing skills. These range from tools to help students develop collaborative writing and peer editing skills to more creative tools to help students exploit poetry and develop stories and fictional narrative.
to help students write collaboratively and / or peer edit each others’ work.
To show how to start with a very simple idea and add more detail to make the idea more interesting.
to demonstrates the use of different clauses and relative clauses in sentences as well as the impact of using more adverbs and adjective
to have style checking of writing
to inspire digital writing activities for students
to access writing groups or just write about specific image based prompts
To check how polite the written communication is
To create branching stories or reading mazes
To create digital story books
To inspire learners what to write about
to get students creating short books on their mobile phone
to collaboratively create short texts such as poems or haiku
LISTENING TOOLS
Listening tools include a range of tools and resources to help you develop your students’ listening skills. These range from a wide variety of authentic ready-made content based around news or songs to tools that can be used to support and assist with listening skills whilst watching video clips from YouTube.
to provide lesson plans as well as listening activities for audio on a range of news related content
to provide music videos in a range of different languages
to provide music videos in a range of different languages with a great variety
to provide a news summary every week
to provide a vast collection of lesson materials designed around current news stories
to allow kids to use and browse videos on YouTube without having to worry about them finding anything inappropriate
To capture information from the closed captions of YouTube videos and then creates a summary and/or word cloud of the script from the video
SPEAKING TOOLS
Speaking tools include a range of tools to help you develop your students’ speaking skills. These range from tools to help with specific areas of pronunciation to tools you can use to get students recording their own voices. These tools can help you to create engaging multimedia activities that get your students speaking.
To use their computer microphone to dictate text into the page
to quickly record and share example audio recordings of sentences, words or texts for your students to listen to
To create and share short audio clips
to get students talking about or describing images they create or upload
to create sequences of images and videos and record a monologue about each one
to work with text and phonemic script
to convert up to 300 characters of text into phonemic symbols
to use YouTube as a form of corpus
GRAMMAR TOOLS
Grammar tools include a range of tools to enable you t develop your students’ understanding of English grammar and syntax. These range from tools that analyse grammar to those that enable you to instantly create grammar activities or create corpus based materials that exploit authentic online content.
to create interactive grammar and vocabulary activities based on the subtitles and transcriptions from YouTube videos
to get students to check their own sentence structure and vocabulary
to analyse the grammatical structure of sentences
to provide a competitive quiz game that anyone can join
to give access to a corpus of more than 3.7 billion words collected from web news sources (News On the Web).
to quickly create verb conjugation charts
to instantly create interactive cloze test activities based around any text
PRESENTATION TOOLS
Presentation tools include a range of tools and resources to enable you to create and share presentations. These range from tools to help you share presentations for the classroom
to tools which enable you to add talking head narration and embed presentations into online courses. There are also tools to help you create simple animated presentations or more unusual types of presentation like web based posters or single page websites.
to share presentation through a range of social media
To get students to stand up and do a presentation
To create online presentations
To host your presentations online
to create a single webpage and add different kinds of media and text to the page
to create either a sequence of slides or just use one slide as a kind of digital poster
to represent a shift away from the traditional linear form of presentation
POLL & SURVEY TOOLS
Poll and survey tools include a range of tools to help you create polls and surveys. These range from complex multiple question type polls with embedded multimedia, to simpler single response, brainstorming and collaborative type polls that can be used for crowdsourcing and sharing information.
to produce surveys with up to 10 questions and collect up to 400 hundred responses
to create survey simply
to create survey simply
to create survey with many attractive template designs
to explore the pros and cons around a particular problem and really pull in ideas from the students
To brainstorm words related to a topic or how students feel about a topic
INFOGRAPHIC TOOLS
Infographic tools include range of tools to help you create various kinds of visual representations of information. The tools in this chapter vary from those that can be used to create standard graphs and infographics, to ones that can be used to quickly transform text into to visual displays.
To drag shapes and images onto and create your own designs
To automatically select an image icon to go with each statement
to make interactive infographics with various types of hotspots and animations
to create infographics or presentations based on templates
to create a wide range of designs but these must be shared publicly
to create an infographic design that can be used as a CV
to create infographics based on very wide range of templates that you can edit and add images and icons to
to create infographics based on very wide range of templates and examples
to create word clouds
to create timeline type infographics that are linear and based around historical or narrative events or processes
COURSE CREATION TOOLS
Course creation tools include a range of tools to help create web based courses and course materials. The tools included vary from LMS type tools that enable to create complete structured courses to those that support live synchronous
learning and face-to-face online teaching. There are also tools that can help you create and sell your own lessons and courses.
to create and sell your own online courses
to create a wide range of multimedia interactive activities
to start creating web based materials
to create highly interactive and touch responsive learning content for mobile devices
To create interactive ebooks for delivery on either Android or iOS tablets
to build onto more traditional course book based courses and add a blended element
to create classes and groups and add students to them and then create and assign texts from the internet as reading activities
to create your own free Moodle installation
to start making money by training or mentoring online
Comments