Education is a sector where increasing digitization makes a lot of sense: better teacher-student feedback, flexible classes, e-learning, and tremendous prospects. The digital revolution can be fit everywhere. Managing a classroom has never been easy, but classroom management apps can make life easier for tech-savvy teachers and students. For teachers and students with iOS devices, managing the classroom can be made easier by using classroom management apps.
1. ClassDojo
Providing regular feedback is an important aspect of classroom management—whether online or offline. Traditional feedback mechanisms have been constrained and largely one-way: Parent-teacher conferences and report cards—they did little to account for day-to-day changes in student behavior or factor in overall trends.
Class Dojo leverages technology to provide real-time three-way feedback functionality, connecting teachers, students, and parents. Students each get a profile that’s visible by them, their teachers, and their parents. Teachers can score students across a wide range of parameters, such participation, and teamwork.
These scores are updated in real-time and accessible by all parties. Teachers and parents can also message each other to keep in touch directly through the app.
Price: Free/In-App Purchases
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2. Google Classroom
Google evidently has a cloud-enabled solution for…well, just about everything. Education is no different and the Google Classroom suite offers teachers robust classroom management functionality.
Integration with Google Drive makes the whole process much more collaborative—assignments and materials can be distributed through shared Drive access and Classroom’s functionality allow teachers to make announcement and students to participate in the discussion.
The Student Selector feature is particularly interesting—it allows a student to be selected at random to ask a question: sitting in the back bench is no longer a safe strategy!
Price: Free
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3. Seesaw: The Learning Journal
As we’d mentioned earlier, enabling regular communication between teachers, students, and parents is one of the ways digitization is transforming the education sector. As a portfolio app, Seesaw helps to do just this.
Seesaw provides students with individual digital portfolios in which they can share their work for teachers to approve and parents to see—there’s flexibility here in that images and photos can be stored as well.
Teachers can approve portfolio items so parents can rest assured that the material they’re seeing in their kid’s Seesaw portfolio is classroom-relevant.
Price: Free/ 1 Month $12.99
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4. Kahoot! Play & Create Quizzes
Gamification’s been taking over all kinds of processes these days. Even Amazon’s reportedly gamified its warehousing process to encourage workers to achieve greater efficiency. Learning, at its best, is always fun and is a natural candidate for gamification.
While we have covered other classroom polling apps in this feature, Kahoot! Is notable for how it integrates quizzing and other processes into a game-like interface that makes learning fun. The app allows learners and teachers to create rich, multimedia-based quizzes on the fly that can be done individually—say, as homework—or in class.
The competition aspects add an element of spice to question-answer sessions in class.
Price: Free/In-App Purchases
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5. Plickers
Many schools have a no-cellphone policy, and for good reason too: Students text, check social media, and generally stay off-task all the time! But this is no reason why digitization should be limited! Plickers is a classroom management solution that requires just the teacher to have access to a mobile device.
Multiple choice questions are projected or displayed on a smartboard and students then hold up Plicker sheets—sheets of paper with a large QR code-like symbol that can be rotated to correspond to different multiple-choice answers. The teacher then simply scans the classroom with their phone and student answers are recorded.
Plickers makes tests participative and takes much of the headache out of scoring them.
Price: Free
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6. Doceri Interactive Whiteboard
Smartboards have always been about flexibility and convenience: There’s so much more a teacher can show on a smartboard than is possible with a whiteboard. But at the end of the day, it’s still very much an experience dependent on logistics and positioning: How do students focus on a smartboard is it’s far away or at an angle from them? Doceri aims to bring the smartboard right to students’ desks.
Doceri requires both students and teachers to have smart devices. Teachers can material on their iPhone or iPad and this is then made available on all student devices at the same time.
Price: Free/ $4 – Watermark Customization
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7. Additio – Teacher gradebook
So far, we haven’t covered the most important benefit of digitization for teachers—ease of assessment. Grading and evaluation are a major pain-point and in schools with large pupil headcounts, teachers often spend as much time grading work as they do teaching—and this often takes place after-hours.
Additio is a gradebook app that makes the grading process significantly easier for teachers and allows students to get feedback much quicker. Additio isn’t just about grading though—it has a wide range of functionality.
Teachers can handle everything from lesson planning to attend to student self-assessments through the app.
Price: Free/ $7.99 Premium
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8. Socrative Teacher
As a teacher, thousands of years ago, Socrates was all about two-way engagement between learners and teachers. The Socrative app leverages 21st-century technology to make that a possibility in every digital classroom. Socrative allows for live polling on-the-fly—you can input questions that students can all respond to without pointlessly waving their arms around.
Socrative can be used to visualize understanding—how many students answered a given question correctly? Is that an area you’ll want to cover again? Socrative’s reporting functionality allows you to have a paper trail of in-class progress. There’s Google Drive integration too if teachers want to keep things on the cloud instead.
Price: Free
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9. Moodle
You don’t need to keep your iOS device connected to the Internet while using Moodle. You can browse the content of your courses offline. When there are events, you will get instant notifications and messages for intimation.
Find and contact other people in your courses; moreover, you can upload images, audio, video, and other documents from your iPhone or iPad. Check your performance by viewing your course grade.
Price: Free
Download
Well, that’s it for this edition of There’s an App for That, too. If you’re tired of sticking around the classroom but still want to train your brain, why not check out our list of the best number games for iPhone and iPad.
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- Best iPhone and iPad Games for Preschoolers
Which classroom management app did you find the most useful? Share your feedback in comment section.
