12 multimedia learning tools for the classroom

Key points:
Multimedia learning tools play an important role in classrooms in a number of ways–including, but not limited to, boosting creativity, encouraging student engagement, and helping students learn to collaborate. Shy students may come out of their shells when allowed to give a presentation via blog post or podcast. Natural leaders may emerge during group work as part of a team presentation assignment. Other students may find their true artistic calling using graphics or creating videos in the classroom. Multimedia learning tools engage students, and as we all know, students who are engaged in their learning often demonstrate higher academic achievement and take more ownership of their learning. Related content: 20 top edtech tools Because there are so many tools and teachers have limited time, we’ve compiled this list of multimedia resources to get you started on your search. 1. iMovie: With iMovie for iOS and macOS, students can browse video clips to create Hollywood-style trailers and 4K-resolution movies. They can even start editing on iPhone or iPad, then finish on a Mac. Students can unlock their creativity with green-screen effects in iMovie for iOS and macOS, placing themselves or their characters in exotic locations with a tap or a click. 2. SoundCloud: Students can use SoundCloud to create and share their own podcast, all from one place. With a Pro Unlimited plan, they can schedule releases, highlight their most popular podcasts, and more. 3. Book Creator: Book Creator is a simple tool for creating awesome digital books. Create your own teaching resources or have your students take the reins. Combine text, images, audio and video to create interactive stories, digital portfolios, research journals, poetry books, science reports, instruction manuals, “about me” books, comic adventures, and more. 4. Nearpod: Create interactive lessons in minutes–save prep time by importing existing lessons (pdfs, jpegs, ppts) and adding virtual field trips, collaboration tools, quizzes, polls, and more. Or, start in Google Slides add your favorite Nearpod activities. 5. Google Slides: Google Slides saves you time, keeps you organized, and allows you to connect and collaborate with your students in real time. Get started today with resources and tips from educators like you. 6. Soundtrap: Soundtrap for Education empowers students and teachers to explore creative sound recording in all subjects, for all ages and ability levels. It features integrations with major LMS systems and smart user management. Easy-to-use classroom features include assignments, lesson plans, and more. Teachers can give remote lessons through the virtual learning environment. 7. GradeCraft: This learning management system that helps instructors build gameful courses & encourages students to focus on the craft of learning. Flip the framework of your course so that everyone starts at zero: students earn their way up to success as they complete milestones. Empower your students to make choices about when and what type of work they want to do: they choose how to demonstrate their learning. 8. Piktochart: Choose from a library of over 800 professionally designed infographic, presentation, and print templates. Wherever your ideas take you, you might just get there faster with our ready-made designs. Add beautiful interactive charts, animated icons, images, and videos. Edit fonts. Change colors. Move things around. It’s design on your terms – right from within our intuitive drag-and-drop editor. Put your visual work out for the virtual world to see. Print it. Share it directly to your social media accounts, or password-protect it for sharing with clients and colleagues. Whoever you want to reach, we want everything you touch to delight each life it touches. 9. Glogster: Students can tell stories in classrooms, share experiences from a field trip, and express ideas using images, graphics, audio, video, and text–all on one digital canvas. Users can find information and inspiration with a constantly-growing library of more than 40,000 top-quality glogs from classrooms around the world. Categorized into 80 topics across 9 disciplines, these hand-picked glogs make up a rich and engaging resource. 10. Popplet: In the classroom and at home, students use Popplet for learning. Used as a mind-map, Popplet helps students think and learn visually. Students can capture facts, thoughts, and images and learn to create relationships between them. 11. Explain Everything: Create collaborative learning experiences where students and teachers can share thoughts and ideas in real-time. Strengthen leadership and collaboration skills by giving students the tools to create and share their own tutorials, animated stories, and presentations. 12. VoiceThread: Ed.VoiceThread is a platform where students develop critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity skills. Educators can use VoiceThread’s K-12 features for student presentations, conversational practice, professional development, rich assessment, and more.

BetterLesson and Adobe release 300+ strategies for creativity, student engagement

As educators across the country work tirelessly to provide engaging lessons in new and ever-changing environments, there are still understandable concerns about low student engagement, low teacher morale, and a lack of professional development to meet teacher and students’ needs.

To support educators with student-centered learning, BetterLesson and Adobe have teamed up to create 325 free instructional strategies that build creativity, collaboration, and communication skills using products in the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. The strategies span middle school to higher education contexts, across a variety of subjects including math, science, social studies, and literacy.

Each strategy was created by an experienced educator, selected and supported by BetterLesson through their “Master Teacher Project” model. Thirty-three educators from across the United States (and two from abroad) met in Professional Learning Communities and received targeted feedback on their strategies from veteran instructional coaches.…Read More

GoGuardian Finds Three Factors That influence K-12 Student Engagement Online and In-Person

The GoGuardian Research and Insights team today announced its comprehensive findings on the factors that create an engaging learning experience in K-12 schools, both online and in-person, in its 2020 State of Engagement Report.

The report released by GoGuardian, an education technology company supporting thousands of K-12 schools and over eight million students through powerful tools and research, captures field research from the GoGuardian Research and Insights team, with insights from more than 450 students, teachers, administrators and policy leaders across the U.S. Through this eight-month research project, they identified the factors that impact an engaging learning experience and strategies that school boards, administrators and teachers can implement to help improve student engagement. Because the COVID-19 Pandemic has restructured U.S. classrooms to an online or hybrid model, this report also includes a supplemental analysis of existing research and literature on engagement in online learning, to provide context on how the themes discovered in the field research apply to the current distance learning environment.

“Engagement levels in a learning experience are dynamic and context-driven, but our research found remarkable commonalities across many school communities and stakeholder groups. We’ve found a few consistent themes relating to the variables that impact engagement and the indicators that signal students are engaged in what they are learning,” said Mariana Aguilar, director of research at GoGuardian. “The lessons that created the most engaging experiences for students often were a combination of opportunities that encouraged discussion, gave students learning choices and allowed students to create. These elements are immensely transferable both in the online and in-person classroom and can facilitate a positive learning environment, whether in a synchronous or asynchronous setting.”…Read More

Savvas Delivers Innovative Back-to-School Solutions to Help Teachers, Students and Families Succeed with Distance Learning

After listening to educators, parents and caregivers from across the country, Savvas Learning Company today introduced a range of platform enhancements and new K-12 educational products aimed at making distance learning more impactful. They include features specifically designed to help teachers seamlessly shift between in-person and remote learning, easily identify both learning gaps and the critical content from the previous grade to close them, as well as increase student engagement with immersive activities and simplified access to their digital content.

“We’ve heard loud and clear what educators and families need to make distance learning more effective this school year. With every moment of instructional time being even more precious when students return, teachers are looking for support to help smoothly pivot between remote and classroom teaching and address unfinished learning. Meanwhile, parents and caregivers want help getting their students up and running on their digital programs,” said Bethlam Forsa, CEO of Savvas Learning Company. “At Savvas, we have made it our mission to give educators and families the solutions they need so that their students can get the most out of their learning, no matter where it takes place this year.”

Long known for building learning solutions from the ground up to be used successfully in a blended classroom and online learning environment, Savvas, formerly Pearson K12 Learning, set out to further enhance its content and advanced technologies for more optimized remote teaching. This includes lesson plans, instructional tools, and readiness assessments specifically geared for distance learning. Savvas also created training videos and other resources to support teachers and parents in maximizing their use of its award-winning learning management system, Savvas Realize™.…Read More

Promethean Joins Google for Education Partner Program

Global education technology provider, Promethean®, announced that it has become a Google for Education Partner, integrating its ClassFlow® software with Google Classroom rostering, Google Drive, and Google Single sign-on.

ClassFlow® is a cloud-based lesson delivery software with advanced collaboration tools that empower student engagement. ActivPanel® is an interactive display series that delivers innovation and ease of use that matters to teachers and students and provides the security and manageability trusted by school IT professionals and administrators.

Promethean products work well on Chrome OS™ operating system environments, offering customers intuitive educational solutions that promote student-teacher interactivity, productivity, and engagement. Key features include:…Read More

Google introduces Teach from Home

To support the hundreds of millions of students and educators currently facing school closures, we’re introducing Teach from Home—a hub providing information, tips, training and tools to help remote teaching and learning.

Recent weeks have been especially challenging for teachers, students, and families as schools close and normal routines are disrupted. This transition is all the more daunting for educators who aren’t yet comfortable using technology, let alone our tools, so we want to make it easier to get started. To help with that, we’ve developed Teach from Home, a temporary hub of information and tools to help teachers during this crisis. You’ll find resources to enable remote instruction, student engagement, collaboration with peers, and more.

For more advanced resources, explore the COVID-19 support page for training materials, blog posts, videos, and other resources to help engage students through distance learning.…Read More

How film and a flipped classroom lead to student success

According to research, in a typical classroom lecture students will generally retain only five percent of the material presented. Today’s teachers are looking to new methods of teaching and learning to improve student engagement and achievement, including tech-based solutions like the flipped classroom.

Designed to create an environment for students to actively participate and engage with the material provided, the flipped classroom is shown to exhibit learning gains almost two standard deviations higher than those found in traditional classes.

Related content: 8 principles to help you advance to flipped learning 3.0…Read More

Why I use student-driven ideas in my curriculum

You might think that teaching a high school programming course in which students are asked to code simple games and interactive websites would be motivating and exciting, but there are unforeseen elements of dealing with the teenage brain and the influences on their lives that seem to creep into the most well-designed plans. Students come to class with various types of anxiety, fears, and coping issues from daily stresses. They are also distracted with social media and the availability of instant information at their fingertips. As teachers, how do we keep them engaged and focused on their learning with the overwhelming amount of social and emotional distractions in their lives?

Student-driven ideas: the key to keeping students engaged

Keeping students on task is a constant challenge, so when I observed some students playing an online game when they were supposed to be working on an assignment, my first reaction was to ask them to close the program. Then I began to wonder why they were so fixated on playing this particular game. I wasn’t dealing with the typical Fortnite addiction; this was an escape-room game. (If you are not familiar with an escape-room game, Wikipedia defines it as a “physical adventure game in which players solve a series of puzzles and riddles using clues, hints, and strategies to complete the objectives at hand.” I asked these students why they liked this game and they eagerly gave me their reasons, which revolved around conquering a personal challenge.

I realized that students didn’t seem thrilled about the work I asked them to do. Instead, they decided to switch to something different that caught their attention and motivated them to challenge themselves. My lesson had some important elements of coding included so I didn’t want to toss it out completely, but I wondered if I could use the “escape room” idea to spark a new level of interest in my plans. Should I let my student’s interest and/or distraction drive my curriculum?…Read More

5 tips for getting over your #edtech fears to engage and empower students

I have been lucky. I was on a computer at a young age, playing Math Blaster or Oregon Trail until my eyelids grew heavy and I had to crawl into bed. This is probably like today’s student playing Fortnight until the sun comes up. I don’t remember using technology in school but think about how powerful my learning experiences would have been with simulations and the ability to create.

Today’s students have the opportunity to collaborate and make global connections within the classroom; they can try to solve problems and share BIG ideas. I used to be hesitant about using tools that I thought were a better pedagogical choice because I thought I needed to know and understand how to use the tool before teaching students how to use it. Then I realized that I am in this profession for all of our students—not just myself—and that it does not always have to be about the technology. If I held onto my own fears, the students would suffer.

I’ve spent time reflecting on why educators need to stop giving into our own fears and realized that some of us just don’t know where to start. Here are some sound tips for getting over your fears to help engage and empower students.…Read More

5 useful tips to get the most out of virtual field trips

To help educators save time, we’ve put together a quick recap on how to prepare for your next virtual field trip (VFT) and five of the best VFT’s based on their relevancy, quality of resources, and potential for student excitement. Student engagement starts with excitement, so get planning!

Prepare: Like any lesson plan, consider how you can prepare your students. First, don’t forget the standards, curriculum, and content you are helping your students uncover. By connecting these virtual field trip experiences to content that you want students to learn, you can ensure students come to the event ready to participate. Also look for pre-event activities your students can participate in. Not only do these activities promote student thinking about what might happen during the virtual field trip, they also allow you to create connections to the specific content you wish to cover.

Engage and connect: During the event, make sure that you take advantage of any virtual connections that are possible, such as submitting questions for panelists before or during the event, or participating in Twitter backchannel conversations as the VFT unfolds. Your participation helps guide live panelists and provides your students the opportunity to be recognized. There’s not too much more exciting then hearing your class’s name and question read aloud during a live virtual field trip.…Read More

Alan November to host student engagement webinar

Students are not engaged in the classroom like they should be, and educators are searching for ways to bridge this gap to create the best learning environment for each of their students.

Modern technologies are making it easier to engage students, but choosing the right technologies to support student engagement in the classroom is a difficult task, and one with an important goal: creating learner-centered environments in which students can thrive.

On Thursday, 8/25 at 1 PM EST (12 PM CST, 10 AM PST), Alan November will give a live presentation on Student Engagement.…Read More