Knowledge
Top Free Classroom Collaboration Tools for Teachers, Students and Schools
Education technology is changing at a rapid pace and it is now possible to conduct entire lessons online if necessary.
A number of Digital classroom collaboration tools are available for free with excellent support and training.
Education technology is changing at a rapid pace and it is now possible to conduct entire lessons online if necessary.
A number of Digital classroom collaboration tools are available for free with excellent support and training. Technology majors like Microsoft and Google are vying with schools and students to capture a major chunk of the education technology space.
Here we list some of our favorite tools to make classroom collaboration easier using technology along with the links to the websites from where an educator can download / access these:
Bubbl is a collaborative mind-mapping tool for generating new ideas and concepts in the classroom. The free version allows up to three mind maps at a time, all of which are savable and shareable.
Bubbl is an online tool; no installation required.
ThinkBinder is a collaborative whiteboard and study tool which allows teachers and students to share files, ideas, and build projects together. Groups are separated off with their own codes so that you can set up codes for the entire classroom as well as for group projects, which are all accessible to the teacher.
This is a fantastic tool for tracking classroom or group progress on assignments.
With Microsoft OneNote, teachers can create notebooks that help them stay organized, deliver curriculum, and collaborate with students and colleagues.
Office 365 Education is a collection of services that allows you to collaborate and share your schoolwork. It’s available for free to teachers who are currently working at an academic institution and to students who are currently attending an academic institution. The service includes Office Online (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote), 1TB of OneDrive storage, Yammer, and SharePoint sites. Some schools allow teachers and students to install the full Office applications on up to 5 PCs or Macs for free.
GSuite for Education (formerly known as Google Apps for Education)
G Suite for Education is the same set of apps that users worldwide know and love—Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Hangouts, and more designed with new intelligent features that make work easier and bring teachers and students together. Google believes that when students and teachers break down silos and have collaborative tools for their classroom, amazing learning can happen.
Haiku Learning revolves around your content. Create classroom pages, add and organize content blocks, change layouts, and publish whenever you’re ready. Embed content from YouTube, Google Docs, Maps, Skype and dozens of other third-party services or create your own from scratch. And when you’ve crafted the perfect classroom page? Resource sharing in Haiku Learning lets you share your classes, pages, and content blocks with any other Haiku Learning user–and use content in your own class created by other teachers.
Wikis provide an easy place to create a members-only web site where users can have discussions, share documents and so on. Wikispaces was built for education. They even have a special “classroom” tool that is focused on Collaborative Writing: Wikispaces Classroom.
Besides these tools, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have also recently become very popular with educators to communicate and collaborate with older students (13 years and above) and allow them to share content as well as tips via Videos, Hashtags and links.
Images and Source – Respective tools' website