Innovations in Education: Essential Apps for the Physical & Digital Classrooms

The modern classroom in an educational institution is more than a physical room. Today it is a digital space for learning and collaborative, productive work.

Due to the pandemic, the technology world has received a big boost in developing distance learning systems and methods.

According to the Statista website, the most common use of digital learning tools by K-12 (from kindergarten to 12th grade) teachers in the United States enabled students to practice something learned (e.g., through exercises), with 85 percent of teachers reporting this option. The least common usage was for reading textbooks, with 33 percent.

In any case, it is not the tools that teach but the teachers. However, as people of our time, it is our responsibility to learn how to use these tools to foster collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking, and fairness for all.

Essential Apps for the Physical & Digital Classrooms.

1. Seesaw

Seesaw is a learning management system that works well from kindergarten to high school and up. With this tool, you can see the learning outcomes and collect data about them.

Seesaw allows students to document their learning independently, and parents can directly observe what the child was doing in the lesson.

Thanks to this tool, each parent can observe how their child copes explicitly with a particular task, makes a video or illustration of his mathematical solution.

2. Swork-It Kids

Swork-It Kids is a free physical education app that introduces children to strength, agility, flexibility, and balance exercises. It’s easy to set up the activity and its duration here. Plus, classes are demonstrated by the same children, which simplifies the repetition process. Thanks to this application, the child himself can learn to move without the unnecessary intervention of instructors.

3. Google Workspace

Google Workspace or G Suite is a collection of cloud services provided by Google to other businesses and groups of people. Drive, Classroom, Gmail, Calendar, Documents, Slides, and more. It is an entirely crucial powerful tool with one-stop solutions for everything you might need in training.

These tools provide teachers with enough resources to teach and students to create, transform and present their learning.

But Google Workspace offers easy sign-in, universal access across all devices, and improved real-time collaboration features. And best of all, it’s completely free.

A Forbes article outlines what features Google Workspace has introduced as a result of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Among them, for example, support for the second screen in Google Meet – which makes it easier for students to learn.

4. Edpuzzle

When you need to study remotely, you often cannot ask the teacher to stop or repeat what was said.

With the Edpuzzle Chrome extension, you can import any YouTube video directly to the Edpuzzle platform. From there, you can insert multiple choice questions or open-ended questions into your video of choice.

In doing so, you, as a teacher, can monitor students’ progress in content and view their answers to your questions. Edpuzzle also combines a no-skip feature with a dashboard that shows you exactly how much of your video each student has watched.

In today’s world, engineers have already done a lot for distance learning. However, it is always about creating a learning experience that is convenient for everyone, which simplifies gaining knowledge at a distance.

Any dedicated software development team strives to find a solution to the process, not the tool itself. We are looking for instruments that help students access information, collaborate with classmates, learn to understand, reflect on their progress, or creatively present their learning.

It might be worth accepting if we can say that a tool achieves one or more of these goals. The tools in this article are definitely worth your attention to make the learning process even more convenient.

Author’s bio: Anastasiia Lastovetska is a technology writer at MLSDev, a software development company that builds web & mobile app solutions from scratch. She researches the area of technology to create great content about app development, UX/UI design, tech & business consulting.