10 Must Have Tools for BYOD Classroom

November 10, 2015
With the advance of technology and mobile gadgetry there emerged a wide variety of learning trends endemic to 21st century classroom environment. One of these trends is what is conventionally referred to as BYOD/T (Bring Your Own Device/Technology). In a BYOD classroom, students bring their own technology (e.g hand-held devices, laptops..etc) and use them for various learning activities. The pedagogical strength of BYOD is that it is an effective way to personalize learning and allow students easy and quick access to the technology they need to explore and learn collaboratively in a student-centerer environment.

There are now several web tools and mobile apps that support BYOD learning. The collection below features 10 popular recommendations in this regard. And as we have argued elsewhere, the emphasis in BYOD should not be on technology itself but rather on the pedagogical ends to be addressed using that technology.

1- Google Classroom

“Classroom is a new tool in Google Apps for Education that helps teachers create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and easily communicate with their classes. Classroom helps students organize their work in Google Drive, complete and turn it in, and communicate directly with their teachers and peers.”

2- Socrative Teacher and Student

‘Socrative empowers you to engage and assess your students as learning happens. Through the use of real-time questioning, result aggregation, and visualization, you have instant insight into levels of understanding so you can use class time to better collaborate and grow as a community of learners.’’

3- Google Drive

Google Drive suite of productivity tools allows you to easily create, share and store all your files in one single location accessible anywhere with Internet connection and across different devices.

4- Nearpod

Neared is another indispensable tool for BYOD classroom. It combines ‘presentation, collaboration and real-time assessment tools into one integrated solution’.

5- ClassDojo

ClassDojo is a classroom tool that helps teachers save time, boost classroom engagement, and improve student behavior quickly and easily, with no painful data entry. ClassDojo also lets you communicate student progress with parents and students. Best of all, it’s completely free.

6- TodaysMeet

TodaysMeet is a great web tool for creating backchannels with your students. It is very easy and simple to use. You can use it in your class to engage students in sideline discussions and chats around a given topic. The process to set up a backchannel via TodaysMeet is very easy: first, create a room and given it a name and a duration then share the URL of that room with your students and start the chat.

7- Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere is another powerful web tool to collect feedback from your audience. This tool provides you with a variety of templates and feedback forms to choose from.Audience answers in real time using mobile phones, Twitter, or web browsers. The neat feature I like the most about PollEverywhere is that it lets you see your response live on the web or in a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation.

8- WeVideo

WeVideo is another good web app to use for editing videos on Chromebooks. With WeVideo you can import media files you have stored on Drive, Dropbox and edit them the way you want. You can trim clips, split long clips into smaller ones, insert text for titles and captions in different languages, record voice-overs, add professional themes to your videos, add music, transitions and many more.

9- The Answer Pad

The Answer Pad is an interesting educational platform for teachers. It combines two powerful functionalities: it is both a student response system and a grading solution for your quizzes. It is an ideal tool for engaging students in a flipped or blended learning classroom. As a teacher, you can use Interactive to directly involve students in their learning by providing them with an outlet through which they can show what they know. Students-generated feedback is a great source of data to inform and guide your teaching and also makes you aware of areas that need more work .

10- LearnBoost

“The LearnBoost gradebook provides a free all-in-one classroom management solution for tracking student grades and progress, creating and sharing standards-aligned lesson plans, generating beautiful analytics and report cards, syncing calendars and schedules, and connecting with parents and students.”

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