Are you teaching online and facing challenges with your students’ engagement and participation? Here are some interesting collaboration tools for Microsoft Teams that add interactivity to your online sessions and enhance your students’ learning experience.
Flipgrid
Flipgrid is a simple, free, and accessible video discussion experience where teachers can create discussion topics and share them with learners. From their side, learners respond to these topics by recording and sharing short videos with their teacher and classmates. Flipgrid can be added to Microsoft Teams so that students can add and record directly from inside Teams.
Pear Deck
Pear Deck allows teachers to create interactive presentations by adding multiple-choice questions, drag and drop activities, drawing activities, text and numbers responses, and websites’ links to their presentations to create active learning and formative assessment opportunities. When learners respond, teachers can see the outcomes in real-time and share with the class, to promote class discussions and drive students’ engagements. All Pear Deck lessons can be shared in Microsoft Teams.
EdPuzzle
EdPuzzle allows teachers to choose videos from YouTube, Khan Academy, and other websites or use their own videos to track students’ comprehension by adding their own voice narration and questions. Also, they can check if students are watching the videos, how many times they’re watching each section, and if they’re understanding the content.
Nearpod
Nearpod, one of the greatest collaboration tools for Microsoft Teams, helps educators develop interactive lessons that contain quizzes, polls, videos, collaborate boards, open-ended questions, matching pairs, and more to check students’ understanding. They can access thousands of pre-built K-12 standards-aligned lessons or upload their own lessons and make them interactive. All Nearpod Lessons can be shared as a tab in Microsoft Teams, making it easy for students to access the lesson content quickly and easily.
Padlet
Padlet is an online “virtual wall” tool where learners can share thoughts on a common topic. It’s like a piece of paper, but on the Web where collaborators can simultaneously create and organize posts of any content type, whether it be text, documents, images, videos, audio, or links.
The bitmoji virtual classroom that we shared in an earlier post is also one of the interesting collaboration tools for Microsoft Teams. You may check a step-by-step tutorial on how to create it here.
Using bitmoji classrooms during distance learning is now trending. Check out these bitmoji classroom templates developed by the dedicated Lebanese educator Donna Yazbeck and get them from our store.
The upcoming academic year is going to look quite different from a typical school year where many teachers will be teaching virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to establish a small sense of normalcy for their students and add some fun to the teaching-learning process, several teachers are using the virtual bitmoji classroom. They are creatively decorating their classrooms with clickable elements that redirect students to the needed content.
Are you a teacher willing to create your own classroom and looking for ideas of what to include in it? Have a look at the below bitmoji classroom ideas beautifully created and developed by different teachers. Also, if you don’t know how to get started, check out a step-by-step tutorial here or buy a customized one here.
Bitmoji Classroom invaded the education community as several schools switched to distance learning to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers across the globe are spending time creatively developing theirs!
When embedded successfully in the school’s LMS, students will definitely love this rich classroom environment containing an avatar playing the teacher’s role. They will also enjoy the interactive elements allowing them to click through to see assignments, documents, videos, and websites.
How to Create a Bitmoji Classroom for Microsoft Teams?
1. Design your avatar on Bitmoji
Download the Bitmoji app from the App Store or Play Store and create your Bitmoji by selecting physical features like hair, mouth, eye color, and an outfit. When you finish creating your character, you can cast it in a huge array of activities, such as reading, singing, or even eating.
A tutorial video by Elisabeth Peacock
2. Add the Bitmoji extension to Google Chrome
Download the Bitmoji Google Chrome extension, which allows you to choose an activity for your Bitmoji (reading, laughing, saying “hello”) to copy and paste it into the PowerPoint document containing your virtual classroom.
A tutorial video by Elisabeth Peacock
3. Build your classroom on Microsoft PowerPoint
Follow the steps mentioned in the tutorial video to decorate your classroom. Choose the needed material from the resources below and then add the interactive elements that allow your students to click through to see assignments, documents, videos, and websites.
To fight the spread of COVID-19 and maintain healthy social-distancing, schools have temporarily closed and quickly transitioned from on-campus to online learning. In line with this, Unesco shared 8 useful live-video platforms for distance learning.
Below is a list of the most used live-video platforms for distance learning:
Dingtalk – Communication platform that supports video conferencing, task and calendar management, attendance tracking, and instant messaging.
Lark – Collaboration suite of interconnected tools, including chat, calendar, creation and cloud storage, in Japanese, Korean, Italian and English
Hangouts Meet – Video calls integrated with other Google’s G-Suite tools.
Teams – Chat, meet, call and collaboration features integrated with Microsoft Office software.
Skype – Video and audio calls with talk, chat, and collaboration features.
WeChat Work – Messaging, content sharing, and video/audio-conferencing tool with the possibility of including max. 300 participants, available in English and Chinese.
WhatsApp – Video and audio calls, messaging and content sharing mobile application.
Zoom – Cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, collaboration, chat, and webinars.
Flipgrid is a simple, free, and accessible video discussion experience where teachers can create discussion topics and share them with learners. From their side, learners respond to these topics by recording and sharing short videos with their teacher and classmates. Flipgrid can be added to Microsoft Teams so that students can add and record directly from inside Teams.
Pear Deck allows teachers to create interactive presentations by adding multiple-choice questions, drag and drop activities, drawing activities, text and numbers responses, and websites’ links to their presentations to create active learning and formative assessment opportunities. When learners respond, teachers can see the outcomes in real-time and share with the class, to promote class discussions and drive students’ engagements. All Pear Deck lessons can be shared in Microsoft Teams.
EdPuzzle allows teachers to choose videos from YouTube, Khan Academy, and other websites or use their own videos to track students’ comprehension by adding their own voice narration and questions. Also, they can check if students are watching the videos, how many times they’re watching each section, and if they’re understanding the content.
Nearpod, one of the greatest collaboration tools for Microsoft Teams, helps educators develop interactive lessons that contain quizzes, polls, videos, collaborate boards, open-ended questions, matching pairs, and more to check students’ understanding. They can access thousands of pre-built K-12 standards-aligned lessons or upload their own lessons and make them interactive. All Nearpod Lessons can be shared as a tab in Microsoft Teams, making it easy for students to access the lesson content quickly and easily.
Padlet is an online “virtual wall” tool where learners can share thoughts on a common topic. It’s like a piece of paper, but on the Web where collaborators can simultaneously create and organize posts of any content type, whether it be text, documents, images, videos, audio, or links.
