Looking for the best tool for online teaching? 

Thomas Courtley, ex teacher and LessonUp education specialist

Thomas Courtley

Education Specialist

Cover image blog_ Looking for the best tool for online teaching

We all know that teaching can be challenging sometimes. You have the immense responsibility of preparing the younger generations for the future. You offer your students tools, knowledge, compassion, interaction, and a safe place where they can experiment & learn. It comes as no surprise that the best online teaching tool celebrates teachers, and offers targeted solutions to support you in your challenges & needs.

Teachers will always be essential to inspire, motivate and lead students. You know what your students need and how to activate them. What you often miss is an all-inclusive digital teaching tool: enabling you to create complete digital lessons, send homework, correct it, test your students and give them constructive, instant feedback. 

LessonUp knows this because we work with teachers. We have been listening to you for years, and follow your tips and suggestions. That’s one of the reasons for our success. We work for you, think from your point of view and have educators within our team. 

5 reasons why LessonUp is one of the best online teaching tools

The question is: How can you enhance your lessons with digital tools? How can we celebrate and support you in your endeavour to provide the best digital didactics?  Based on our experience talking to numerous teachers and visiting them at work, there are 5 things that an online platform should provide to support you:

1. The possibility to import your ready-made teaching material

You have been creating teaching and learning material for years. You don’t want it to go to waste, and have to copy or create it all over again. With LessonUp that’s not necessary. You can integrate Teams, Microsoft classroom, ZOOM, Powerpoint and more in just a few steps. Nothing goes lost, and you can start building new lessons starting with the latest topics. 👉 link to youtube (how to add powerpoint slides in under 1 minute).

2. Use and personalise existing lessons, or create your own

If there is an existing lesson on a certain topic, and it is qualitatively good, why create a new one? That makes sense, and although some of you like to personalise their lessons, editing an existing lesson saves time if compared with creating a new one. Look for inspiration in our free Lesson library or our Premium lesson collection, with lessons designed by specialised content creators. Or feel free to start creating your own lessons.

alt

3. Engage your students instantly with interactive elements

One of your main objectives is to engage your students and inspire them to keep on learning. Students need to be stimulated more these days. The younger generations live in a world that constantly triggers, engages, and activates them. LessonUp solves this by offering you numerous interactive elements to work with: quiz questions, open questions, photo questions, mind maps, drag & drop questions and many more. Each one stimulates a different kind of engagement, making your lessons more dynamic!

alt

4. Find your own way to test your students

Once a lesson is completed, you might want to assess what your students have learned and what they are struggling with. In LessonUp, on the contrary of other platforms, it is easy to create a test out of an existing lesson, in one single click. After that, the test is customisable. If test questions are related to each other or fall under the same topic,  you can create practical question bundles or choose to hand them out in random order.

alt

5. Differentiate lesson material based on your students’ needs

You are often looking for ways to differentiate your lesson material based on your students’ needs. Even better if there is an effective way of differentiating a lesson, without spending too much time on creating several versions of it. In LessonUp, you can label your slides with different colours, in order to define who works with what. Students are given clear instructions on which colours they are to work with.

5 other platforms that also offer online teaching tools:

  • Quizlet
  • Kahoot!
  • Nearpod
  • Pear Deck
  • Powerpoint

Do these 5 platforms also support your needs as a teacher?

The answer is: partially. All tools are different and focus on certain features more than others. While Nearpod and LessonUp are very strong in offering interactive elements, Kahoot! is known for its huge quiz database, and PowerPoint as a top presentation tool.

  • Nearpod offers a wide selection of interactive elements to engage students, almost as many as LessonUp. Interaction is very important to both platforms. With LessonUp, for example, you can embed a spinner, traffic light, or hotspots to interact with your students also with visuals in motion. 

  • Kahoot! provides the biggest amount of quizzes, and offers instant feedback options, as LessonUp does. Nevertheless, LessonUp also saves the feedback in student reports, automatically generated and safely stored within the LessonUp classroom environment. 

  • PowerPoint is a well-known, fine tool to build, organise and create content slides. Its main focus goes to the creation of detailed and well structured presentations. With PowerPoint, on the contrary of LessonUp and other platforms, interaction is up to you.

  • Quizlet promotes sharing and collaboration with colleagues. Collaborative features can be interesting for teachers of different subjects who are working on the same learning objectives. LessonUp also offers a great number of  sharing and collaborative features. It is popular as a school-wide tool in The Netherlands. More than 450 schools work with LessonUp every day.

  • Pear Deck is a great teaching tool that promotes interaction and digital learning. It has a lot in common with LessonUp. For both platforms, student interaction and the achievement of teaching/learning objectives are central. However, LessonUp also generates student reports, and stimulates the tracking & analysis of your students’ academic progress. 

Curious to try LessonUp as online teaching tool?