4 Many Useful Tools For Teaching

4 Many Useful Tools For Teaching

 

Being a teacher is hard. You must make the students pay attention to you, understand the lesson and why the lesson is important for their life. On top of this, you must correct their homeworks and reduce the amount of mistakes they do. No wonder teaching is overwhelming! But, have you ever wondered how to use technology in order to make it easier? We researched the topic for you and here is what we discovered.

 

 

Text to sound softwares

Do you teach a foreign language, but your students never seem to understand the local’s accent? Is it hard even for you to have a perfect pronunciation? Bringing a native speaker to help you can be expensive. That’s why we suggest you to use a text to sound software.

 

How does it work? You write the text, then press the play button to have the software reading for you. You can always record the sound with the recording software from your laptop. In case you teach a language that is spoken in more than one country, you’ll need a software that has different accents. For example, British English is different from American English and your students might need to understand only one accent. Teaching Arabic might prove a bit more difficult, as this involves different dialects. On the other hand, you are very lucky if you have to teach Polish or Bulgarian, as these languages are spoken into only one country.

 

What software could you use? Text to speech online is a website where you type your text or directly upload your document. Although it has a paid version, the free one is more than enough to prepare your lessons. The texts can be in English, Bahasa, Dutch, Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and some other languages from the Far East. For languages that are spoken only in one country, Google Translate is a very good option, too.

Microsoft Excel

 

A homework or a test can contain a variety of questions and exercises. If yours imply only one correct answer, your life just became much easier, thanks to Microsoft Excel.

 

This software comes automatically with the installation of any Windows operating system. It is used mostly to create tables, but you can also input all sorts of functions. Do you have to calculate the overall grade of your pupil’s results? Excel can do it. Do you have to compare the correct answer with the one given by your pupil? Excel can do it, and even mention the word “correct” plus changing the cell’s background colour.

 

How to create such a test? Below is an image with an English grammar exercise. The exercise was created for Romanian students, hence the weird words. In the right column, you can see how the word “gresit” (wrong) becomes “corect” (correct) once the student gave the correct answer.

 

Image Source: Exercitii de gramatica in engleza

 

On the other column, I wrote the correct answer, but in white colour, to not be visible for the student. Then, in the results column, I added the following formula:

 

=IF(F6=B6,"corect","gresit")

 

When you apply this formula, you must change the cell names (F6 and B6) with the suitable ones from your table. Also, you might want to change the words.

 

How to calculate the overall score? On the bottom of the page, I added the following formula:

 

=(COUNTIF(E4:E37,"corect"))

 

Again, you must change the cell names (E4 and E37) with the cell names from your table. Also, this word must match the word for “correct” written in the “if” function above. The colon (:) sign tells to the software that must check every single cell, from E4 to E37.

 

It’s easy, isn’t it? Now that you created the test, just add it to the school’s network, right before the test begins. The students will only have to complete the empty cells and any attempt to pass the results from one to another, can be easily seen by you in the network.

 

Microsoft PowerPoint

Do your students yawn pretty often while you teach? No matter how many images, music and objects you bring to class, at the end of the day, it’s just you talking. And a monologue is boring. This means that some of your students will fall asleep, interrupt the hour with all sorts of crazy associations, or miss important bits of information. The solution to all of these is an interactive lesson.

 

PowerPoint allows you to add buttons in the presentation, that lead to external links or just another slide. For example, on each page you can add a “Questions?” button, that goes to another slide, comprising a FAQ list. Or, you can add mini quizzes, with one correct answer. In case someone answers wrong, you can direct them to a slide with an explanation why that answer is wrong.

 

The example that I can provide is a lesson about how to find a job in the UK through Facebook. The course doesn’t exist anymore, so some links might be broken. But it has a button on each slide and some external links. It’s just to give you an idea about how you can use PowerPoint to create awesome lessons. Feel free to create a much more interactive material than mine.  

 

Facebook chatbots

 

Have you ever received an automatic reply, when trying to contact a Facebook page? Congratulations, you have met a bot! Companies use chatbots instead of humans when they have to say many times the same thing. For example, most of the people will ask about the opening hours or will need reminders before an event. So, the chatbots have the combined function of a parrot and nagging human being.

 

How can they help you as teacher? Let’s say your students learn the C++ code language, their program never compiles and you always troubleshoot them in the same way. Instead of you checking every single student, you could ask your chat bot to do this. So, the student will say “hi” to trigger the bot, then will receive the question “Do you have a semicolon at the end of your row?”, with the options “yes” and “no”. The student will check every single row and will pick the relevant option. If every row has a semicolon , the bot will ask another helping question.

 

What is your advantage? All the students will receive your help in the same time, by accessing the chat bot created by you. This bot is useful every time when your pupils need to learn a procedure, process or algorithm. The example provided is created for a pool designer, with ManyChat bot. Please send the word “ hi “ as private message, to the page, in order to trigger the bot.

 

What other tools could you use, that I didn’t? Around me, I have seen pdf documents that can be filled and signed without being printed. Last year appeared a font for dyslexics. It’s easy read by everybody, so you might consider using it into your documents. And, some teachers will be delighted to find about free websites that simulate science experiments.

 

How do you use the technology in everyday teaching?

 

Author Bio: Andreea iovita is the owner of Immigrant School. She aims to help immigrants that live in the UK to get a better job. For this reason, Immigrant School offers online English lessons and CV writing services. You can connect with her on www.immigrantschool.co.uk