Thank you very much for joining our eTEACHERS.Online community. eTEACHERS.online is a place to share what really works. Our CORE Training Course will give you hands-on training with e-resources that support essential teaching skills. If it hasn’t been helpful to English teachers already, you won’t find it here. The 11 e-resources in the course include both new apps to transform your teaching and more familiar apps that you can use in innovative ways. More details about this course could be found in the above video. Enjoy!

Teachers have to make presentations. You may be giving a long, detailed, traditional lecture or just briefly recapping some main points. You may even be introducing a student-centered lesson, with innovative and interactive activities. But either way, as a teacher, you still have to present engaging content to your students in almost every lesson. In this unit, we will introduce you to the presentation apps that we recommend most. Whether you’ve used them before or not, we want to help you take advantage of the many great features of these resources.

Although PowerPoint is more familiar to teachers in terms of its well-equipped presentation features, Google Slides is preferred instead because it is not only a cloud-based application, but also a platform that well integrates itself with Section 1.2 Pear Deck, Section 3.2 Google Forms/Quizzes, Section 4.1 Google Blogger, and Section 4.2 Google Classroom.

Pear Deck is an interactive presentation tool that can be used as an add-on to Section 1.1 Google Slides. Students can follow along with the teacher’s slideshow and answer interactive questions in real time. As the teacher, you can choose to present student responses anonymously in different layouts. 

Experienced teachers know that they can talk all day, but that doesn’t mean students will learn anything. That’s because students learn by thinking and doing. In this unit, we want to introduce you to apps that are guaranteed to engage students more actively. We’ve taken the recommendations of many e-teachers and we’ve curated them carefully.

Student to student interaction is also important for students to practice their English skills in an authentic way. To make it possible, here we introduce Padlet, a powerful application that encourages students to understand, communicate and collaborate in or across pairs, groups, teams and classes.

Flip (formerly known as Flipgrid) is a video-based tool that allows for active discussion between teachers and students and among students themselves. When creating a Topic in Flip, you and your students can add text, images, stickers, drawing, board, AR lens and more to your videos.

There are many different kinds of evaluation and assessment that are important to classroom teachers. But at its heart, all evaluation is about truly understanding our students’ learning needs better. The more we know about our students, their strengths, their weaknesses, what they’ve already learned, and what they haven’t, the better we can tailor our teaching to meet them where they are today. In this unit, we will dive into tools that we are confident will allow you to conduct authentic and timely assessment of students’ learning in ways that go way beyond traditional classroom assessment.

Edpuzzle is an easy-to-use platform allowing you to engage every student in the classroom with your video assignment. Unlike Flip, the video-based platform introduced in this course, you can add cuts, voiceovers, multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions, and notes to your video. You can also prevent students from skipping the video, a unique feature in Edpuzzle.

Similar to Google Slides, Google Forms is also a cloud-based application. It allows every Google user to create a simple survey form with many cool features. For example, you can create a variety of questions, enable response validation, and include images and videos in your survey form with ease.

In addition to survey forms, you can also enable the Quiz feature in Google Forms in one click. After you’ve enabled that feature, you can create your questions, assign point values, and provide individual feedback for every question you create with Google Forms. More importantly, Google Forms will grade closed ended questions automatically for you.

Organization is essential if teachers are going to provide this kind of structure and scaffolding, but it’s not always easy. In this unit, we will explore tools that provide teachers with great platforms for effective organization. You can use them occasionally, for specific kinds of activities or tasks, or you can integrate them into your daily routines.

With a virtual classroom, teachers can manage students’ learning anytime and anywhere. In this section, we will introduce you to Google Blogger, a tool that can be used to build a virtual classroom, where teachers can manage information and resources more efficiently and more effectively.

Google Classroom is a powerful learning management system that can help teachers create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and easily communicate with their students. You can find it very useful when integrating other Google Apps for Education, such as Section 1.1 Google Slides and Section 3.2 Google Forms.

In this unit, we want to share and recommend tools which can do “one great thing”, or tools that do an ordinary but necessary thing in an extraordinary way. These are tools that harness the power of technology to enhance your teaching. We hope that as eTeachers you will find technology not just a necessary tool, but a powerful ally in helping to make your lessons more engaging, effective, creative and fun.

Any e-resources teachers have learned from the previous sections could be shared via a single QR code using QR Code Generator. It is a handy tool for teachers to redirect their students to the e-resources they need.

Audio recording is perfect for students to have audio-related activities in and out of the classroom. For example, students can enjoy reader’s theater activity as demonstrated in the above video. To record an audio, one easy way is to use this Online Voice Recorder tool. Compared with the Flip Audio feature, it’s a signup-free and easy-to-use app for you and your students.

Videos play an indispensable role in flipped teaching and learning. There are a lot of video recording platforms in the market, and the one we recommend here in our course will be Webcamera. It’s also a user-friendly app like Online Voice Recorder. You can use it to record a self-introduction, feedback to your students and more to your students.