Vital Apps for the Organized Teacher

Cluttered classrooms call for an unnecessary commotion.

The very sight of papers strewn across your desk, cupboards overflowing with the assignments of students, the topsy-turvy desks, and chairs is enough to perplex the calmest of educators. In such chaotic circumstances, you would either end up losing your lesson plan beneath a great pile of papers, or, misplace a project submitted by a student or worse, lose your temper!

In order to offer a superior quality of education combined with contemporary teaching styles, it is extremely essential for teachers to be organized.

Did you know that the renowned author A.A. Milne believed that organizing yourself prior to starting something afresh is very important as it checks your tendency to mess up things?

How can Teachers be more Organized?

Well, there does not exist any ‘Gospel truth’ that can aid teachers in organizing their classrooms.

An organized classroom must aim at systematic accessibility. When a classroom is organized, teachers spend less time in wandering about the desks, glancing at the tasks of students, and, locating the study materials to be distributed among students. Not only must your classrooms be neat and tidy, but everything must be in perfect order.

However, organizing something is rather a subjective idea, as something that works for you might not work well for other teachers. For, the teaching strategies of teachers vary greatly.

Apps that Guide Teachers to be Organized

I have compiled a detailed list of some of the most vital apps for the organized teacher. Utilizing them would enable you to maintain a cleaner classroom and also make things more simple and systematic for you. Such apps are known to assist teachers in storing files, sharing student assignments and even assembling everything into a single folder for displaying the progress of students to parents.

Why not take a look at the following applications that support better organization for teachers?

#1. Google Drive

An effective cloud-based platform, Google Drive permits users to share, save and work on documents for Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Slides and much more. It would help you gain access to your files from any electronic gadget and make the process of collaborating fun and exciting for you.

You can steer clear of the risk associated with losing any of your photos, videos and documents if you use this powerful app.

That is not all. You can also invite your students to view, edit and add comments on your files. Google Drive makes it possible for you to:

• Gain access to videos, photos, PDF files, and documents
• Look for files by name as well as content
• Share files and folders with other people
• Arrange for files to be modified by your students or other teachers
• Enable offline viewing of files

#2. Evernote Scannable

How many of you have heard about the Evernote app? It is a marvelous app that helps course instructors in designing lesson plans, preparing grade sheets and a lot more. But, do you know about ‘Evernote Scannable’?

This is an app that lets you scan and also store images, photos, pictures, documents, project-based learning materials, etc.

If you install Evernote Scannable app on your tablet or smartphone, you would be capable of:

• Scanning any and every document since the app makes your camera point at your photographs, images and documents, scanning them steadily and automatically

• Saving considerable amount of time since Evernote Scannable automatically crops and rotates thereby adjusting images according to your requirements and making them convenient for reading

• Saving and also sharing your documents with your fellow colleagues, students and learning communities with the aid of text or e-mail

#3. YouTube

If you believe in a digitized education, YouTube would be one of your best choices ever when it comes to apps. It can guide you in creating a special channel for your classroom. The best part about it is that you can choose to introduce the concept of flipped learning in your classroom with YouTube, by adding video lectures and a large amount of study materials.

This would act as a powerful platform for uploading course work, storing digital lessons and sharing them with students.

In other words, YouTube is a blessing for teachers. For, just like pictures convey a hundred words, videos too, are highly expressive that make the learning processes much more interactive for learners.

You can use YouTube to:

• Search for videos that you have watched or liked
• Surf through ‘recommendations’ of videos
• Post comments, likes and also share videos that you find interesting

#4. Dropbox

Boasting of exclusive cloud-storage facilities, Dropbox is a beautiful app that enables file synchronization. What I mean is, if you store a particular file in Dropbox, it would appear exactly in the very same way in all your electronic devices.

So, if you have a course curriculum stored in your Dropbox account in your laptop, you can easily access that file from your tablet or desktop installed at school!

Be it videos, photographs, images, documents or any other file, this app works wonders with all of them. You have a safe backup of valuable information and it would also be possible for you to send files to students – even if they don’t possess a personal Dropbox account.

Some of the characteristics of Dropbox include:

• Editing files of Microsoft Office from any device
• Sending large files
• Keeping a back-up of videos and photos

#5. Pocket

Technology has been influencing education in multiple ways. It has simplified the process of collaborating and sharing crucial information among students and other educators to a great extent.

The ‘Pocket’ app is mainly used to save and also tag social media posts, blog posts, books, and documents.

It offers an amazing experience as it lets you save articles and videos, making it convenient for you to read them by adjusting their views for your phone and tablets. You would be able to stay connected to your learning materials and lesson plans even while you were mobile, if you employed this app.

Pocket is unique as it lets you:

• Organize your notes and information by enabling tagging and searching
• Store all your data as it is equipped with unlimited storage space
• Is compatible with popular apps comprising ‘Flipboard’, ‘Feedly’, ‘Twitter’ etc.

via: www.durofy.com

#6. Remind

Most teachers find it challenging to keep their students’ parents involved in their classroom lessons. Students hardly let their parents know when their teachers send messages to parents via notices!

This is one of the main factors that restrict the ability of teachers to communicate with parents.

How about an app that helps you interact freely with your students and their parents? ‘Remind’ is one such app. With Remind, you can send homework reminders, alerts, assessments and motivational quotes directly to the phones of students and their parents. Since the phone numbers are private, messaging is really safe!

You can easily inform parents about latest announcements through Remind. In addition, it also assists you to ‘chat’ with parents and students that makes for a more personalized approach.

Basically, it keeps you informed of home assignments and announcements beyond the classrooms.

#7. TeacherKit

‘TeacherKit’ is among the most appreciated apps that aid teachers in organizing their classrooms as well as pupils.

You can record attendance and keep a track of the academic performance of students thanks to this app, helping you do away with the responsibility of regular administration. This would leave aside plenty of time for you that you could dedicate to your primary duty: teaching.

It helps you manage the different types of attendance in your class like ‘sick’ or ‘tardy’.

Behaviors of students can be managed effectively with TeacherKit thus encouraging teachers to improve the behaviors of students. You might even contact parents through the app and keep them informed about their child’s attitude and performance in class.

The app is beneficial for teachers since it helps:

• Record attendance just with a few taps
• Add notes concerning the behavior of your students
• Edit the status of attendance records
• Keep parents in the loop
• Makes it teacher-friendly by supporting the Arabic language

#8. Socrative Teacher

Quizzes and competitions in classrooms energize students and trigger in them a curiosity to learn more. They start enjoying their lessons.

Moreover, they also retain information better when they start learning in such innovative ways. Why not experiment with diverse teaching techniques to enhance student learning?

‘Socrative Teacher’ is one of the best modern apps that are utilized by successful teachers to revolutionize lessons with question polls, quizzes, and other formative assessment tools. But, do you know what makes this app so different from the others? It ameliorates and offers visual displays of the results thereby helping you improve you processes of instructions in future.

Here are some of the cool features of this app:

• Asking multiple-choice questions
• Helping users develop their personal quizzes
• Viewing the results of students
• Asking open-ended questions and voting on the results

#9. Nearpod

There exists a unique app that permits you to manage content on the electronic gadgets of your students! Any idea what it is?

Well, it is ‘Nearpod’, dear teachers. You can offer presentations, assess your students’ progress and also collaborate your study materials with your students if you install this app. Now, in order to explore Nearpod, teachers must possess a tablet or a desktop.

The app allows teachers to:

• Develop content: You can log in to the official website of Nearpod and create interesting presentations enriched with different drawing tools, quizzes, polls, videos and much more

• Capture student attention: You need to log in to www.nearpod.com to manage the content of your lectures on the devices of your students

• Assess: You would be able to view the answers of students with the aid of this app, in real time.

#10. OneNote

I have often observed teachers maintaining journals in which they jot down their to-do lists, an outline of lesson plans, summaries of lectures and a schedule of classroom sessions they are about to conduct.

‘OneNote’ app is your one-stop resource for organizing your priorities and anything you wish to organize.

It is your ‘digital notebook’. You can capture a photo or record any audio file and OneNote does a wonderful task saving it immediately. Free OneNote apps are available for iPad, Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Mac and so on.

Teachers can use OneNote for:

• Collecting notes for class assignments or research
• Clicking a picture of the whiteboard
• Taking handwritten notes while delivering notes
• Equipping notes with video and also audio

Which is the app that best meets your teaching objectives? Contemplate before installing any of these apps on your tablets or iPads, dear teachers. Most of them are compatible with Android and can prove to be productive for you. Best of luck for a more organized classroom!