Online educational tools are showing the way forward

Online educational tools are showing the way forward

Edmodo is an educational tool to connect teachers and students. It is assimilated into a social network. With the help of this tool teachers can achieve excellence in academics through creation of online educational consortiums and collaborative groups. It keeps regular provision for educational materials. Furthermore, it measures the efficiency and performance of a student, alongside interacting with parents. It has more than 34 million users who together create a more effective digital teaching-learning process. It provides a tripartite service: content, technology, and platforms, which connect a tripartite party: students, teachers, and parents. It provides a distance learning solution at a time when schools, colleges and universities are almost non-operational.
Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who laid the foundation of western philosophy and western political thought. He is also credited as the first moral philosopher of the western canon. His method of teaching is basically a kind of dialogue reliant upon question and answer. It is way to develop critical thinking, new ideas, and hypotheses. The Socratic method of teaching depends on a series of questions framed in a manner that leads to the generation of ideas among students. It develops critical thinking among students as well as teachers. By posing a series of questions, the teacher has the opportunity to develop participatory learning, the students excited and involved as much as possible. The theoretical underpinning of students is strengthened as the teachers start with questions of which the students have to understand the answers. This sort of critical learning creates an atmosphere where students are truly learning by thinking and solving, as opposed to an atmosphere where they are just collecting information and later forgetting it.
Socrative is a very popular digital educational tool designed by a group of engineers and entrepreneurs who have great thirst for education and knowledge. It is a system that enables teachers to create educational games or exercises which students can solve using their smart mobile phones, tablets or laptops. Depending on their scores, teachers can change or update the subsequent lessons to make them more interesting and personalised.
Educational games and videos that are animated have the capacity to enhance creativity in learners and inspire them to explore multifaceted and dynamic knowledge aspects. This leads to a multiplication of skills in students. Animation helps develop more participatory presentations. Animoto is a digital educational tool that enables creation of high-quality videos from any mobile device in a short time. It helps in improving academic plans and targets. Animations are always fascinating and eye-catchy.
Thinglink is another educational tool offering teachers the possibility to create learning methods that raise the spirits and awaken the curiosity of students through participatory material that widens their knowledge base. It allows educators to create interactive pictures with sounds, music, and texts which can be shared on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Quizzes make us smart and help store information in our brains, thereby providing a strong base for the next learning stage. Projeqt is an educational tool allowing us to create online quizzes and presentations. During a class session, teachers can give a quiz to students and share with them academic presentations adapted visually to different devices.
Online learning via above mentioned digital educational tools offer teachers an efficient way to deliver lessons to students. These tools should be necessarily used as part of their lesson plans. The nature and scope of the lesson plan in this pandemic should go beyond traditional textbooks to take account of game-based learning, critical learning, smart educational tools, and online resources. In this way, twin goals will be achieved: Students will become smart and confident, and teachers will become more efficient educators.
COVID-19 demands a global education network which connects all learners and teachers. Online learning tools can help teachers provide instantaneous feedback to their students, so that students are more receptive towards their learning.

The writer is Assistant Professor at Department of Economics, University of Kashmir. [email protected]

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