Engaging your students in the classroom has never been easier with easy access to affordable technology resources. These tool will help you create new and captivating lesson plans for your curriculum and help students apply the lessons in ways not available in the educational environment before. These following resources are a small sampling of the interactive educational technology resources available on the Internet.

Collaboration Planning

Lesson Cast is a great resource to share ideas and collaborate with teachers on a global scale. Teachers can submit lesson plans in the form of two-minute PowerPoint slides that are vetted by veteran teachers. Whether you need inspiration, feedback, or want to share your own great ideas; this forum is an excellent opportunity to network with like-minded professionals and hone your creative curriculum development skills.

Vivid Reports

Save paper and promote creative interactivity with Glogs. This interactive, visual platform allows users to combine several multimedia elements to produce captivating, digital posters. Combine text, video, graphic, and audio components to create a multidimensional supplement to a lecture. Or, allow students to combine digital features to produce vivid reports for homework on classroom presentations. Glogs can bring your subject come to life and engage students by providing lasting impressions.

Guage Understanding

Determine in real-time if your students grasp the subject matter with tools such as Poll Everywhere, Socrative, or Mentimeter. These polling apps provide a quick snapshot of the class’ aptitude on a particular subject giving teachers immediate feedback on whether moving on to the next subject is warranted.. Creating short quizzes or open-ended response questions using one of these tools. Students respond using internet-enabled devices. Grasping the level of competency is quick and easy with constant feedback and will help inform your instruction.

Digital Feedback

Gone are the days of the red pen. Teachers can now use interactive tools to give custom and personal feedback to help guide students through corrections or lessons learned from assignments. Tools such as Evernote are readily available on any Internet enabled device. You can leave personal notes that help students delve deeper into the subject matter.

With a recording device (readily accessible on most current laptops and tablets), use Screencast-O-Matic and Jing to record your voice of screen to help students better understand your feedback. For common mistakes, you can share short audio/video clips over and over for an efficient use of your grading time.

Harness the Power of Video

SchoolTube, a user generated video content site like YouTube, is endorsed by leading education associations. This safe, moderated platform is for students to post self-produced videos for classroom use. This site is a great tool to promote video production and sharing in a safe, educationally appropriate environment for students.

These are a few common and powerful technology tools that can be easily integrated into any educational environment helping teachers be more effective in their jobs. Technology doesn’t have to overwhelm you or students. Rather, you can integrate these tools seamlessly with little effort and in some cases low or no cost to more effectively engaged with your students delivering instruction that produces the desired results.

Article written by: Vera Marie Reed, a freelance writer living in Glendale, California. This mother of two specializes in education and parenting content. When she’s not delivering expert advice, you can find her reading, writing, arts, going to museums and doing craft projects with her children.

Tags: Classroom, digital, Feedback, ICT, polls, Resources, Socrative, teachers, technologypedagogy, YouTube