This article covers a list of free educational tools for distance learning during coronavirus. the spread of novel Coronavirus has affected all aspects of life and halt the regular lifestyle of the entire world. This leads to the self-quarantined of the population leading to the closing of schools and educational institutions in order to prevent the further spread of the virus.
Many institutions have made their classes online so that students can still continue their studies from home. But not all the schools, colleges, and other educational institutions have enough online presence to take learning online. Thankfully, big tech companies, e-learning institutions, and distance learning platforms are voluntarily coming forward to fight the situation at hand. Many of such educational platforms opened their doors to the students offering full access to their services during the Coronavirus pedantic. Here, are some of those educational tools and platforms that can help you with distance learning.
Also read: Free Software to Create e-Learning Tutorials: ActivePresenter
List of Free Educational Tools for Distance Learning:
Microsoft Remote Learning
Microsoft has been offering educational tools for a long time now. They have an educational platform that offers educational resources as well as online courses for distance learning. Microsoft Remote Learning is a part of this educational platform that allows users to set up an online school with virtual classrooms for distance learning.
During the Coronavirus pandemic, this Remote Learning is free. Any school can use the platform to bring their classrooms online and get the students back to learning. The remote learning is based on Microsoft Teams which a communication platform with video chat, conference call, voice chat, text chat, groups, document sharing and more. Microsoft is offering free access to this program which is otherwise paid and helping schools to bring the classes to their students.
Kahoot!
Kahoot is an online learning platform for schools, workplaces, and homes. This platform approaches distance learning in a fun gamified way. Educators, teachers, schools, and organizations can join the platform and create game and trivia quizzes in multiple languages and host on the platform. Then, they can share their creation with their students and employees. The students and employees can join the platform as a learner and access the online gamified courses to learn from home.
Kahoot has a freemium business structure where it offers a free plan with limitations. But due to the COVID-19, Kahoot is offering the Premium plan for free. This gives you full access to the platform with more than enough options to fulfill the need and bring the classes online.
BrainPop
BrainPOP is another online platform for e-learning that offers a bunch of features for educators to bring their content online. Educators around the world can use the platform to plan their lessons, make animated movies, and host educational webinars on the platform. Students then can join the platform, access lessons and learn remotely.
To minimize the impact of Corornavirus on education, BrainPOP offering free unlimited access to the platform for schools all around the world. This unlimited access allows schools to plan their class lessons online in order to keep their students on track with studies. It also has support for homework and project to make the distance learning better and more like regular learning.
Flipgrid
Flipgrid is an online learning platform with an idea of bringing the classrooms online. This platform combines modern techniques and approaches to make learning more interesting and engaging. Educators and teachers can host their classrooms online on Flipgrid where students can join and learn remotely. Unlike any other learning platform, there are lots of interesting things for students here. For example, students can interact with each other and use photo filters to share snaps and documents along with other trendy stuff borrowed from today’s social media.
Flipgrid is already free, educators and schools can join the platform to bring their classes online within minutes. Along with students, their family members can also join the platform to keep an eye on their kids and track their reports.
Edpuzzle
Edpuzzle is an online video lesson platform where teachers can make and host their educational videos and share them with their students. It also lets you import videos from other platforms such as YouTube, Khan Academy, Crash Course, etc. The videos can be kept private to a classroom, school or made public to everyone on the platform. The main highlight of Edpuzzle is that it lets you make the video interactive to engage the students, On top of that, it also allowed teachers to check if their students are watching the video or not.
The free plan of Edpuzzle allows a teacher to host up to 20 videos with limited functionality. But during the Coronavirus pandemic, teachers can get free access to the best available plan to bring their classes online. Edpuzzle can easily be integrated with other online classroom platforms like Google Classroom, Canvas, BlackBoard, etc.
Pear Deck
Pear Deck is another online educational platform that helps educators and schools to bring their classes online. This platform offers a proper classroom environment where teachers can add videos along with interactive activities and lesson plans. After watching the video or finishing a lesson, students get an activity exercise where they have to answer questions about the covered topic. The teacher gets a report of all the students along with their answers.
Pear Deck can be integrated with the other online educational platform to deliver better quality and resources together. Although Pear Deck has a limited free plan, due to Coronavirus isolation, they are offering free individual and district-wide access to the platform to bring the schools and classes online.
Tynkor
Tynkor is a coding platform for kids that offers coding classes in a gamified way. This main idea of Tynkor is to make the classes fun that helps in capturing the attention of the kids. With this idea, Tynkor is offering a better platform where kids, teachers, and parents can join together for distance learning. This platform has three sections targeted to the students as per their age group. Teachers can make lessons for the students and parents can track the learning of their kids.
During this unfortunate Coronavirus outbreak, Tynkor is also coming forward to restore education. You can get full access to the entire platform and curriculum at no cost by filling a form. This allows you to access all the self-paced programs available on the platform until May 2020.
Shared Resources
During this Coronavirus pandemic, organizations, institutions, and people are coming together to restore the education and take in online. Above, I covered the educational tools that are free to access for better distance learning. Now, here is a sheet compiled by various groups to bring the other educational resources to the public. This sheet covers a list of educational resources for virtual learning. This sheet has sorted all the resources by their educational level along with a brief description and link to the respective sources.
Closing Words
As Coronavirus (COVID-19) keeps spreading all over the world leading to emergency shut down of schools and educational tools can be really helpful for schools as well as teachers to get back with their studies. With these tools, schools and educators can easily make the transition to distance learning and resume their classes from home. You can check more educational tools and resources here and here. Apart from the dedicated educational tools, video conferencing tools are also making their services available for schools and institutions to take the learning online. Some of these tools are Google Hangout, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc which we’ll cover in a separate article.
