Add to your teaching arsenal with these useful websites.
5. Teachers Pay Teachers
A real well-spring of teacher resources that has subject teachers covered on all fronts. Need special themed resources for activities, presentations, and worksheets? Or perhaps you just need ideas for crafts and/or holiday decorations. Whatever your needs, Teachers Pay Teachers has you covered. The website offers as many free resources as paid ones and also allows teachers to give back by making their resources available to other teachers to use. All in all, it's a useful website that allows you to be a part of the massive global community of educators coming together in solidarity to make classes a little more interesting.
4. Nearpod
Upgrade your presentation with Nearpod's awesome set of tools. Create your lessons, or choose from several pre-prepared lessons and activities. Nearpod is great for online and offline contexts and presents cool features and solutions for distance learning such as VR field trips, interaction with 3D objects, simulations, and much more.
3. Class Dojo
Class Dojo situates itself as a Swiss army knife of education features, but it especially stands out by assisting teachers with a severely underappreciated aspect of the classroom, classroom management. Class Dojo allows for fun incentives for good behavior, and also keeps a record of points and demerits which can be easily visualized and shared with parents. It also provides tools for pairing students, monitoring noise levels, timing activities, and even educational videos. Looking to experiment with communities of inquiry in your classroom? Then Class Dojo is a must-try.
2. ChatGPT/Learnt.AI
AI is all the rage at the moment, so if you haven't jumped on the bandwagon yet, then maybe it's high time. ChatGPT and Learnt.AI are very effective text generators that can be beautifully leveraged to make your teaching career a little easier. Looking for prompts, lesson plans, and syllabus suggestions, or even just a list of the best books to read on pedagogy and/or philosophy of education? Then give these two websites a try. The disadvantage of Learnt.AI is that credits have to be purchased to use all of its features, but it is specifically tailored towards educators, and worth a look. Time to start learning a little prompt engineering, gang.
And for number 1....
Drumroll, please.
Canva!
Canva is an awesome design tool that becomes indispensable once you get the hang of it. It acts as the perfect bridge for instructors and designers to come together and become instructional designers. Create flashcards, wireframes, infographics and so much more on this platform, and don't forget to play around with some of its text-to-image AI generator functions. While a lot of the content requires a subscription, you can still make brilliant designs with its large collection of free images, graphics, videos, etc. Add this baby to your teaching tool kit, you will not be sorry.