While teaching is an essential job, we can still minimize the amount of exposure teaching staff have to outside bacteria, by way of remote work. Today, we discussed some of the best new technologies for helping your educators work remotely, to keep them protected in a post-pandemic world.
Let’s look at the industry favorites for remote work in the education sector.
The Top Techs Working Hard to Protect our Teachers:
There are several technologies that are ideal for helping teachers teach and students learn. Here are a few of our favorites.
- Zoom – for Video Chats with Classes
Need we even mention Zoom anymore? This newcomer to the video platform field came out of the left-wing to trump old-time favorites like Skype, and steal the market majority in the video chat world. They have millions of users across hundreds of countries, and they show no sign of slowing.
Zoom has become an excellent tool for the teaching sector because its video chat function allows for free 40 minute meetings between users. With options for the education sector and deals that make it worth a school’s while to go for the full account, this platform lets teachers see their students, share their screen, and even give and receive assignments.
All in all, Zoom has been one of the saving graces of the pandemic. It has allowed students to keep studying, even when we thought all hope is lost. The downsides are that students need a device to be able to connect with. This has led to schools investing in laptops to be sent home for underprivileged kids to use. Read more about
Social Learning Network in 2021.
- Slack – for keeping everyone on the same page
Next up on our ‘technology no teacher should be without in 2021 list, is the Slack for Education platform. This can be used to unite teachers and teachers, schools with other schools, and students with teachers. It is an all-in-one-place tool for scheduling, setting office hours, collating assignments, and managing to mark.
Slack has recently seen huge leaps in worth to the business sector, where it is being used to keep agile teams on the same page. Schools can use it, in the same way, to make sure that everyone has access to everyone else’s schedule, plans, diaries, and lessons, without having to keep emailing each other every five minutes.
Slack is the ultimate time-saver and, again, they offer discounts for the education version. Teachers can definitely benefit from its many functions. Some of the best for the education sector include unlimited channels of communication, data encryption and user protection, integration of a vast array of teaching technologies, message pinning, private messaging, group document sharing – and a whole lot more.
- Power Automate – for freeing up teacher’s time
There are a hundred little tasks your teachers have to perform each day, that could be automated. It doesn’t take an advanced AI system, either. All it takes is for you to go into Microsoft 365 and fire up the Power Automate platform.
Using this innovative little package (which is included as part of 365 at no extra cost, by the way), we can automate things like taking the register of attendance. We can automate marking where the answers are multiple-choice. We can add this automation to a myriad of little jobs our staff do each day, to free up their time for more important things.
Imagine how much more your staff could get done if they didn’t have to repeat monotonous online tasks each day. Diaries and schedules could be instantly synchronized, appointments could be made on an interdepartmental level without anyone ever having to pick up the phone. Stationery supplies could be ordered before they run out… the possibilities are admittedly small, but they are also endless.
Ensuring Happy Teachers Starts with Staff Training
Staff wellbeing training for teaching employees can teach your staff how to manage the new technology you introduce in a safe, productive way. It can show remote staff how to better manage their own time, and their work/life balance. If you want your staff to be both better off in terms of production and health, then wellbeing training is the must-have accompaniment for all of the above.
