The days of using blackboards and TVs with VHS players rolling into the classroom for a multimedia presentation are far behind us (but not yet forgotten). These days, teachers can access technology to help with their teaching, lesson planning, and even grading. Some productivity tools and services for teachers, like the ones offered by experienced academic transcription companies, are well worth the price and come with packed with benefits.
Like anything else, not all tools are worth the money or disk space, even if they’re free. So, what are the best productivity tools, apps, and services for streamlining education and classroom management today?
In this article, you’ll learn how:
- By leveraging modern productivity tools, teachers can optimize their workflow.
- Transcription services provide an underrated advantage for educators by turning audio and video lectures into easily accessible, searchable text.
- Productivity tools allow educators to cater to diverse learning needs and styles, including those with disabilities or language barriers.
Why Should Teachers Use Productivity Apps And Tools Regularly?
Teachers should use productivity apps to do things easier, faster, and more efficiently. Beyond that, teachers stand to gain a lot more when utilizing productivity tools in schools and classrooms. Here are some of the best benefits:
| Reason | Description |
| Time Management | Productivity tools help teachers track tasks, manage schedules, and prioritize their workload effectively. |
| Enhanced Organization | Tools enable teachers to organize lesson plans, resources, and classroom activities in one place. |
| Effective Communication | Communication tools allow teachers to maintain open channels with parents and students, improving engagement and coordination. |
| Improved Classroom Management | Tools provide features like timers, noise monitors, and group selectors to help manage class dynamics efficiently. |
| Better Feedback and Assessment | Tools allow teachers to provide interactive, personalized feedback, including assessments and grading automation. |
| Collaboration and Resource Sharing | Collaboration tools make it easier for teachers to share resources, collaborate with peers, and streamline lesson planning. |
| Differentiation and Accessibility | Tools adjust materials for different learning levels, ensuring content is accessible to all students. |
| Reduction of Administrative Tasks | Digitizing tasks reduces the paperwork burden, allowing teachers to focus more on teaching. |
Best Productivity Tools And Apps For Teachers
Interactive Learning Platforms
Interactive learning platforms are tools and apps that encourage students to participate actively in lessons and homework. Some apps, like the Kami Chrome extension, allow teachers to annotate PDFs, scanned documents, and images, create formative assessments directly on the app, record, and track grades, and provide personalized feedback directly to students.
Online Whiteboards
Step aside, physical whiteboards. Online whiteboards are all the rage now.
As the name suggests, online whiteboards are digital boards that provide essential class information, such as agendas/topics, instructions, lesson notes, reminders, schedules, etc. The online component improves its functionality by adding timers, noise level monitors, randomized group selectors, polls, gamifying elements, and more. Classroomscreen is a popular example of an online whiteboard.
Classroom and Project Management Tools
Todoist and Trello are prime examples of management tools for classrooms. These apps allow teachers and students to organize or prioritize tasks, plan for future projects, engage in collaborative exercises, track deadlines, and more. Teachers will have an easier time checking up on students’ progress, while students can receive personalized instructions.
Differentiated Learning Software
Advancements in education have brought about significant changes in established norms and beliefs. For example, schools thought a blanket curriculum across grade levels was the best way to promote learning for decades.
We know that students learn in different ways and paces, and educators need to accommodate these different requirements as much as possible. However, personalizing lesson plans for individual students is not a feasible solution.
Teachers worldwide are already underpaid and overworked; adding this massive organizational dilemma would be like asking them to juggle torches while riding a unicycle back and forth on top of a rampaging elephant. The colorful analogy might sound excessive, but you try reining in twenty or more hyperactive, hormone-maddened students daily and see if you don’t feel exactly as I described.
Differentiated learning platforms like Diffit can help, allowing teachers to provide reading materials targeted to their students’ reading levels. It can simplify or amplify text, generate reader-friendly summaries, create tests to assess student levels accurately, and more.
Parent-Teacher Communication Apps
While social media messaging apps are “fine” for classroom announcements, connecting those responsible for a child’s education provides tons of benefits for either parties. Parent-teacher communication apps like ClassDojo allow teachers to update parents on how their children are doing through progress reports and assessments. It can also serve as a feedback platform, events calendar, rewards center, and more.
With such productivity tools, teachers can get a helping hand directly from parents, while parents can get hands-on with their child’s education.
Transcription Services
Transcription, the process of turning audio into text, is an underrated productivity tool for teachers. Due to their simplicity and accessibility, video and audio lectures are used across all grade levels and universities. Turning those recordings into digital, searchable transcripts can immediately improve the convenience and benefits of providing such materials to students.
Transcripts can provide compounded benefits when used with other digital learning apps and tools for collaboration and feedback. Student interviews can be transcribed so parents can read them, or teachers can reference them to track their progress.
The Benefits of Transcription For Educators And Classroom Management
If that’s not enough, here are some of the most significant transcription benefits that boost your productivity.
Improved Cross-Functionality
Teachers can now access various tools that streamline grading, lesson planning, and communication. At the same time, transcription services like Ditto Transcripts seamlessly complement these tools by turning audio and video content into searchable text, saving teachers valuable time.
Transcripts can also help organize your recorded lectures or meetings into searchable files, making it easy to revisit important discussions or lesson content, just like project management apps organize tasks and deadlines.
Adjustments and Improvements
Having recordings and transcripts of previous lectures allows educators to review their teaching techniques. Access to review materials allows educators to see what works, what doesn’t, and what to refine and reuse, significantly impacting students’ learning outcomes.
Accessibility
Many students learn visually, which means they take in information faster when reading. Unfortunately, some suffer from hearing disabilities. Transcription and captioning cover all bases by ensuring that lectures are accessible to as many students as possible. Furthermore, you can cater to different learning styles by providing students with options.
Enhanced Engagement And Absorption
Studies like Captioning Online Course Videos: An Investigation into Knowledge Retention and Student Perception by Whitney and Dallas have found a statistically measurable improvement in student performance when lecturers utilize captioning and transcription. Specifically, captions help reinforce information to improve knowledge absorption, maintain focus and engagement, and enhance student comprehension.
Sharing and SEO
Recordings of lectures can be uploaded to file or video-sharing sites like YouTube. Adding transcripts to videos can further enhance the content, allowing search engines to crawl through the entirety of the content, not just its metadata. This makes it more likely for the lecture video to appear on search engine results pages.
Additionally. transcribing collaborative meetings or group discussions ensures that everyone can access the same information, enhancing coordination between teachers, students, and administrators.
Broader Language Support
Transcripts and captions can be an excellent tool for new learners. Instead of trying to keep up with the speaker, audio transcription allows them to go through the material comfortably. Furthermore, you can use transcription to translate the lecture into different languages. This broadens the reach of your lecture videos, making it easier for international students to access and watch your content.
Furthermore, transcription tools support differentiated learning by making audio or video lessons accessible to students with hearing impairments or offering visual learners an alternative way to engage with the material.
The Benefits of Transcription For Students
Transcription as a productivity tool does not only impact teachers. Here’s how students can benefit:
Time Savings
Let’s face it, not every lecture course is slow enough for notes. Sometimes, lecturers speak a mile a minute, blowing through topics like trying to beat a red light. It can be hard to take everything down, even in the best circumstances. Access to lecture transcripts can save students time when reviewing or hunting for points and facts.
Transcription services further enhance time management by turning audio lessons or meetings into text, allowing students to easily review and reuse materials without sitting through hours of recordings.
Comprehensive Recording
Lecture notes are well and good, but, as mentioned above, it can be hard to keep up sometimes. Having an audio or video recording of your lecture can ensure that everything said gets saved for future reference. No need to fret if you’ve missed a lecture slide; just search the transcript for the last note and pick up where you left off.
Study and Review
Listening to lectures all day can be exhausting. Note-taking may be a good solution, but sometimes, students miss important points due to either fatigue or multitasking. Having lecture transcripts neatly solves those issues by presenting a word-for-word topic recording. They’re digitally searchable and editable, which means anyone can easily copy content and paste it to another document for organization and easier studying.
Referencing
Without making notes, it can sometimes be hard to pinpoint where a specific piece of information came from. The great thing about transcribing lectures is that you don’t need to worry about watching the whole lecture for one data point. Simply enter a search command and find specific portions of the text. Additionally, verbatim transcription can be used as is, so no detail is left unrecorded.
Flexible Learning
Recording and transcribing lectures allow students to review the topics later in their preferred learning environment. They can learn at their own pace, according to their preferred method.
Increased Attendance
A 2022 study by the University of Southern California found that “students who have access to lecture transcriptions are more likely to attend class, engage with the material, and earn higher grades.”
Boost Teacher Efficiency with Productivity Tools and Ditto Transcripts
Teaching and learning in a digital environment is now the norm. With Ditto Transcripts, you can maximize your efficiency while giving your students the type of education they need to succeed. Our academic transcription service comes with a 99% accuracy guarantee, fast turnaround times, affordable prices, and the best customer service in the industry.
Not convinced? Sign up for our free trial and experience the difference.
Ditto Transcripts is a HIPAA, FINRA, and CJIS-compliant Denver, Colorado-based transcription services company that provides fast, accurate, and affordable transcripts for schools, universities, and companies of all sizes. Call (720) 287-3710 today for a free quote, and ask about our free five-day trial.