Best Tools For Educators in 2022

Ultimate Guide to Effective Classroom Management

Over the past decade, the rapid development of technology has completely changed the traditional way of education in the world. As a result, digital education solutions are gradually appearing to help improve teaching efficiency and bring innovative experiences for both teachers and learners.

In this article, AhaSlides will introduce you to the best tools for educators and step-by-guide to use them to create a classroom with new and exciting learning experiences. 

• Noisy Classrooms – The Biggest Challenge Of Traditional Classroom Management
• Why Traditional Teaching Methods Fail In Classroom Management
• Best Tools For Educators 2022: Ultimate Guide To Effective Classroom Management
• Technology Tools For Educators – The New Normal Of Teaching 
• AhaSlides – Best Tools for Educators

Noisy Classrooms – The Biggest Challenge Of Classroom Management

A rowdy classroom with students not paying attention to the lecture is probably the most frequent nightmare of every teacher, whether new or experienced. 

Not only affect the health of teachers because they always have to raise their voices to maintain order, but noisy classrooms also bring the following consequences:

• Lack of concentration and focus: Whether noise comes from outside or inside the classroom, it causes disruption in learning and acquiring knowledge. It will be difficult for students to sit still and concentrate on studying during lessons throughout the day.
• Lack of Knowledge: According to research published in the Journal of Neuroscience, from a neurological standpoint, it is difficult for children to follow leading voices – such as teachers’ voices – and learn in noisy surroundings, even if the noise is not too loud. Therefore, it will be difficult for students to absorb all the knowledge and keep up with the entire lecture, which impacts the quality of student learning.
• Lack of teaching quality: The fact that teachers constantly have to stop lecturing to keep class orderly will reduce the enjoyment of the lesson, as well as the “enthusiastic” of imparting knowledge to the educators.

Overall, these consequences leave teachers feeling powerless to teach and communicate with their students. Even failed to commit to the quality of lessons with parents and schools. It makes the trust in the quality of education fragile.

Why Traditional Teaching Methods Fail In Keeping Classroom Quiet

Although traditional classroom management is still popular today, it seems to be becoming less and less effective for two reasons:

• Lectures are not engaging: Traditional teaching methods are often teacher-centered to become the ultimate authority in the classroom. Therefore, this inadvertently causes teachers to lack creativity in building lessons, and students only learn by repetition and memorization methods. These classes often lack examples and visuals, lack tools for educators for the lesson, and only have information read and recorded from the textbook, which leads to a boring class. 
• Students become passive: With traditional learning methods, students often just sit and wait to be answered questions by the teacher. And at the end of each term, a written or oral exam will be administered. It gradually makes students passive because they are not involved in the process of developing the lesson. This leads to students only passively remembering knowledge without searching or actively asking questions to the teacher. 

In short, students do not feel the need to sit still in the lecture because all the information is already in the book so they do not need to spend time investing more. Then they will start whispering to their friends about the information they found much more interesting than the lecture. Chèn engagement 

So what are the teaching-learning solutions? Find the answer in the next section. 

Best Tools For Educators 2022: Ultimate Guide To Effective Classroom Management

To have an active classroom, teachers need to find new effective classroom management methods with new models, and new techniques, classroom response systems, especially when innovative teaching tools are needed.

E-learning – New classroom model

Virtual Classroom

Under the impact of the pandemic, many virtual classes as well as online teaching tools were born. These online classes bring many benefits to students because of features such as:

• Flexibility: Virtual learning environments provide new opportunities for students to participate in classes on their own schedule. They can learn at their own pace, providing a comfortable way to develop their skills.
• Convenience: Everyone has a different learning speed. Therefore, online learning helps students take the initiative to get documents conveniently, and helps teachers set up virtual folders easily (containing pre-recorded lessons, multimedia files, and other tools to improve learning).
• Time-saving: Online learning will help students save time traveling to school as well as make the most of their time doing assignments and class projects. This self-study will help students better manage time to balance learning and relax.

Flipped Classroom

The flipped classroom inverts the traditional learning experience. Instead of giving lectures as the primary classroom activity, lessons are shared outside of class for individual review as homework. In contrast, class time is devoted to discussions and interactive projects. The main benefits of flipping are as follows:

• The classroom becomes a positive learning environment
• The classroom allows students to learn at their own pace and gives educators more time to teach individual students, rather than the whole class.
• Students can access those learning materials at the time and place that best suits their needs.

Free Tech Tools For Teachers

These tools for educators in Virtual/Flipped classes will make your lessons more engaging than ever:

• AhaSlides: AhaSlides is a free tool with education templates that allows students to answer teachers’ questions, vote in your polls, and play quizzes and games directly from their phones. All educators need to do is create a presentation, share room codes with students, and progress together. AhaSlides also works for asynchronous learning. Teachers can create their documents, add polls and quizzes, and then let students complete the course at a time that works for them.

• Kahoot! is a learning platform using quiz-style games to help students learn by making the information engaging in a fun way.

• Google Classroom: Google Classroom is one of the best apps for teachers that helps teachers quickly create and organize assignments, provide feedback effectively, and communicate with their classes easily. 

• Class Dojo: ClassDojo is an educational tool that supports classroom management and school-to-student and parent communication. Through Class Dojo, parties can easily follow and participate in each other’s activities. This is a small online class providing teaching tools that aim to promote the learning process of students.

• Ted-Ed: TED-ed is a platform that comes preloaded with lots of educational videos, TED talks, and other educational content. With these online videos, you can customize them to create engaging and manageable lessons for your learning. You can also use TED-Ed to create your videos on YouTube.

• Other communication tools for educators: For online teaching via video, you can use tools like Zoom, Google Meet, and GotoMeeting for the best sound and picture quality.

Tips for Managing Online Classes

• Show your face. No student wants to communicate without the presence of the teacher. So make sure you’re always showing your face when teaching and encourage your students to do the same.
• Provide interactive activities. You can create interactive learning activities such as quizzes,… to help break the ice in class and increase people’s communication.
• Test out slides and transmission equipment. Make sure your lesson is delivered with the best transmission. At the same time, each slide also has no errors in content, image, font size, or color.

Tips for Creating an Online Class Schedule

• Create a to-do list: Creating a daily (or even weekly) to-do list allows a teacher to see what needs to be done and when it’s due. It also means they do not have to stress about forgetting to do something because you’ll always have that list to refer to.
• Manage Time: When the teacher first starts online classes, it’s a good idea to take a week or two to check how they’re using your time. Don’t burn the lesson plan, use your time effectively.
• Take a break: It takes short breaks like 15 minutes to keep the mind clear and to manage the class in the best way.

New Ways of Teaching

Project Management for Teachers

In education, project management is crucial. Because to commit to improving the quality of learning for students in a certain period with a certain budget, teachers need project management to apply building processes, teaching skills, and knowledge to achieve the goal of building an effective classroom.

Tips for successful project management for teachers:

• Clearly define your goal. When you are managing any kind of project, especially in education, have a clear understanding of the goals to be achieved to avoid getting caught up in unnecessary work. For example, your goal for this term might be to increase class response by 70% or 30% of students getting a B on an upcoming math test.
• Manage Risks. Risk management is a must for project management. You must anticipate possible risks such as being late for a deadline if you are sick or if students cannot keep up with the new teaching method you are applying.
• Avoid perfectionism. You should forget about perfectionism and instead just focus on meeting predetermined project goals, avoiding wasting time fixing every little mistake.
• Manage time effectively. Knowing the time of each stage to properly implement the work will help the project to be successful and less risky.

Tools for successful project management for teachers: 

• Trello: This is a visual collaboration tool used by educators to make course planning, faculty collaboration, and classroom organization easier.
• moday.com: One of the teacher tools with project management functions such as whiteboard, parent/student update tool, homework reminder, and team collaboration tools.
• nTask: nTask is a project management tool for educational institutes, teachers, administrative staff, and students. With nTask, you have task management, to-do lists, and Gantt charts, meeting management. nTask also offers collaboration and communication tools for educators to help individuals stay connected and keep all information centralized in one platform.

The challenges of project management for teachers

The most challenging change is the shift to online teaching and learning. Because educators easily meet technical problems and are not able to master new teaching methods fast enough. In addition, project management in education requires teachers to acquire new skills such as teamwork, project-related communication, and planning.

New Teaching Techniques

Educators can use new teaching techniques to build Innovative teaching strategies including campaigns, and the proactive process of bringing new teaching strategies and methods into the classroom. At the same time, they can use technology to create improved learning outcomes and solve real-world problems to promote equitable learning. Some New Teaching Techniques:

• Individualized instruction: Individualized instruction is a teaching method that includes one-on-one instruction and self-paced learning based on a framework of course progression goals. Instead of choosing a method or strategy to teach the whole class, teachers choose a method that adapts to the strengths of individual students to help them succeed. Personalized learning experiences require us to experience different online tools. Individualized instruction provides learning experiences, tools for educators, and online learning apps that are optimized for each student.
• Cooperative learning: Cooperative Learning is an instructional method in which students work in small groups to accomplish a common learning goal under the guidance of the teacher. Cooperative Learning differs from other methods in that each group member’s success is dependent on the group’s success.

• Inquiry-based learning: Inquiry-based learning is a student-centered teaching method that engages students by making real-world connections through exploration and high-level questioning. This method helps students strengthen critical thinking, problem-solving and experiential learning.
• Project-based learning: Project-based learning is a learning method based on devising a project for learners and participants who need to cooperate to create a product, a presentation, research, or an assignment. In particular, it allows students to solve real-world issues and come up with new solutions over a longer period of time.
• Nano Lessons: Nano Learning is a tutorial program that allows students to participate in learning a given topic in a 2-10 minutes time frame. Nanno lessons will be learned through the use of electronic media on online platforms without interacting with the instructor. Những nền tảng phổ biến cho Nano Lessons là Tiktok, Whatsapp, 

Interactive classroom technology tools

• AhaSlides: As mentioned above, AhaSlides meets all the requirements to build a classroom with creativity, by creating interactive presentations with spinner wheels, live quizzes, brainstorming tools, and Q&As to keep students engaged.

To find out more about the features available in AhaSlides check out the website here.

• Storybird: Storybird is one of the perfect tools for educators who want to inspire their students in reading and writing. Storybird has hundreds of reading and challenges for students to engage with and is a useful creative tool.
• ThinkLink: ThingLink is a free and user-friendly digital tools for educators to convert images into interactive charts. Create multiple hot spots on specific parts of an image and convert them to a multimedia histogram including video, and recorded audio, or provide a link to any web page with just one click.
• Google Forms: Google Forms is a web-based app used to create forms for data collection purposes. Students and teachers can use Google Forms to make surveys, quizzes, or event registration sheets or to collect any amount of data for a wide variety of purposes.

There are some best apps for teachers to use in the classroom as Socrative, Quizlet, Seesaw, and Classtree, or check out some digital learning solutions for schools to make the teaching process much easier.

Technology Tools For Educators – The New Normal Of Teaching 

Using classroom tools and tech apps for teachers are predicted to be an integral part of teaching solutions in the future as they bring great benefits as follows:

Create interesting lessons that capture learners’ attention. Teachers can use vivid color backgrounds, insert multimedia files to illustrate the lesson, and ask multiple-choice questions right in the lesson to attract learners’ attention. Help learners actively participate in lesson development, even when they are only learning online.

Allows learners to give instant feedback to the teacher through the system. Help the whole class to participate in building the lesson and promptly correct the inappropriate content in the lecture.

Create favorable conditions for special groups of learners. Technology supports groups of people who have difficulty with traditional forms of education, especially groups of people with disabilities such as those with communication difficulties, and visual learners.

How AhaSlides be the Best Tools for Education?

Final Thoughts

There’s no denying the flexibility in education that technology creates. It has helped those who are busy or not suitable to go to school to study anywhere and at any time. Moreover, technology in education will be the trend in the future, and those who master tools for educators will have an outstanding advantage. Grab your chance today with AhaSlides!