Interactive lessons have the power to engage students, hold their focus, and motivate them to become actively involved in their learning. Adding interactive layers to your lessons helps makes learning more accessible and student-centered. Also, interactivity helps students interact with the learning content through various modalities thus boosting both social emotional learning and self-directed learning in class.
There are tons of EdTech tools to help you create interactive and media rich lessons to use in class with your students. The list below features some of my favourite tools in this regard.
1- Flipsnack
Flipsnack is a powerful interactive flipbook maker that enables you to effortlessly create beautiful learning presentations, interactive worksheets and interactive flipbook animations. What’s more, Flipsnack offers discounted pricing for educators. Just one more reason to add it to your teacher’s toolbox!
2- Insert Learning
InsertLearning is a tool that allows you to create engaging lessons through adding interactive media to any webpage. You can insert questions, discussions, videos, and links to other resources into any website and share it with your class. Students can easily access your annotations by visiting that website. They can respond to your questions, engage in discussions and add their own annotations. InsertLearning supports live annotations enabling you to see students annotations in real time.
3- Flipgrid
Flipgrid is an excellent video-based discussion platform that allows teachers and students (and parents) to engage in rich and interactive learning. The way Flipgrid works is simple and easy. As a teacher you can choose a topic you want to discuss with your students and post discussion prompts to which students reply using short video clips. You can also invite guests to join your discussion community. Participants can comment on each others entries and exchange feedback. If you run out of topic ideas, Flipgrid offers thousands of lessons, educational activities, and topic ideas to get you inspired.
4- Kahoot
Khoot provides you with a platform where you can conduct formative assessments through live interactive discussions and learning games. You can create a kahoot for your class and invite your students to join discussion. You can add various types of questions to your kahoot, import slides, import spreadsheets, and many more.
5- Nearpod
Nearpod enables you to create interactive lessons. You can upload your teaching resources such as PowerPoints, Google Slides, YouTube videos and make them interactive. You can also add various types of media including virtual reality, simulations, web content, and more. Project your interactive lesson to the whole class ane allow students to engage in meaningful discussions. Nearpod provides you with real-time stats on students learning progress during the lesson.
6- Buncee
Buncee enables you to create interactive content (e.g., presentations, visuals, lessons, videos, tutorials, digital storytelling projects, etc) to use in your teaching. Buncee provides you with an interactive interface with a wide variety of features to help you create media-rich content. It offers animations, stickers, emojis, backgrounds, and many more. You can also embed your own voice recordings, add photos from your library, and record and use your videos.
7- Genially
Genially is a web tool you can use to create animated and interactive content for your class. You can design presentations, infographics, portfolios, video presentations, posters, CVS, quizzes, games and many more. Creating visual stories is simple and easy and no prior coding experiences are required. You simply login to the site and start experimenting with the templates and tools it offers.
8- Thinglink
Thinglink is a platform that allows you to add multiple layers of interactivity to your content. You can use it to “create audio-visual learning materials that are accessible in an integrated reading tool. All text descriptions in image or video hotspots can be read with Immersive Reader – in over 60 languages.”
Also, Thinglink has this excellent service that takes students on virtual walk-throughs and tours enabling them to “access to real-world environments and situations that would otherwise be out of their reach. Interactive 360° images and videos help develop contextual understanding, academic vocabulary and skills in remote locations, cultures, work environments, or social situations.”
10- Mote
Mote is a Chrome extension you can use to create and share voice notes. Mote is integrated into Google Drive allowing you to easily record and add voice memos into Docs, Slides, Sheets, Gmail, and Google Classroom. Mote also supports transcription in over 20 languages including English, Spanish, Arabic, and many more.
11-Weava
Weava is an excellent tool that allows you to annotate websites and PDFs. Students can easily highlight sections in PDFs and websites and add notes to contextualize and enhance their learning. Using Weava Workspace, students can easily review and edit their highlights. They can also add more highlights and organize everything into a single place.
12- Read&Write
Read&Write gives you access to a number of powerful tools to do much more than just web annotations. You can use it to ‘ collect highlights from text in documents or the web for summarizing and research; create and listen to voice notes directly inside of Google Docs; simplify and summarize text on web pages to remove ads and other copy that can be distracting’…and many more.
