9 Best Website for Teaching Online From Home

hi there Jamie Keita here today a teachers tech hope you're having a great day today I want to give you nine different websites or web applications that can really help you level up your online teaching maybe you're using a few of these already maybe if you want to dig a little bit deeper in them so I'll go through these give you a little bit of tips on them but I also do have tutorials on these ones that I'll put down below in the description below in the top right hand corner you'll see that card that you can click on that will get to them too so let's get started with these nine websites to help you level up your online teaching

now first I want to go over some video conferencing tools and we're gonna start with something by Google if you're part of a Google organization like a business or a school you should check out Google meek if you haven't already you're gonna find it just in your app launch or up top and it looks like this and it's very quick to get started now I'm just gonna go in this case start a practical demo one so I'll hit demo continue and I'm gonna join right away and you can see I actually have an effect of virtual effect in some of my tutorials I will show you how to do this but for this you can quickly just hit join now you do have some other options you can present your screen but as soon as you go join now you can share out your phone you can add people to this and they're going to be invited to this so this is a super easy way to do video conferencing there's extensions and add-ons that you can do so you can see all your participants the Google admin can lock it down further if you want to have more security but they are also doing lots of updates coming up where it's going to be connected in your Gmail and other things too so I would suggest take a look at Google meat like I said I have tutorials down below that will show you how to dive deeper into using this effectively with your classes but that's my first tip here is check out Google meat number

two is Microsoft team so if you're part of a Microsoft organization this is definitely something to take a look at not only video conferencing but for organizing everything for your classes or teams now I'm just on the main page right here of Microsoft teams and you can see where you can sign up for free or get your school signed up for free but if I go over to my office 365 account and just look at my apps I have teams right here so I am online when I'm going into my Microsoft teams but you can also download the as an app for this you can check at the bottom of the corner where you can download the desktop app and usually that's what I work off of and you can see where you can download the app here this works all mobile and everything too but you can create your team's if I go to one of my teams here just let me click on my teams and I'm gonna go to this one you can see inside your general posts and everything and I do take a look at the tutorial I have on this to dive in deeper but you can go ahead and meet online so if I go meet now you'll see I have my camera open here and I can do so many things in this - so if you're I like all the options that you have to share it here because if I go to share I can share powerpoints I have a whiteboard built into this and they're adding more features so you can see more people at once and Microsoft with your security and privacy it is at a very high level so not only just check out the video conferencing part of Microsoft teams do check out everything else you can do with the communications from chat to assignments to sharing files there's so many things that this can do so if

Google or Microsoft isn't gonna work for you for your video conferencing take a look at zoom now they've been doing a lot of updates with their security and privacy issues that they've had and if you look at this zoom is removing the 40-minute time limit for basic free account for K to 12 schools but you can still use this if you're just looking for a free video conferencing you can take a look at this and you can get 40 minutes for your meetings for free but K to 12 they're changing that I'm just gonna get logged in to zoom here and show you a little bit around I'm logged into my zoom account but if you don't have a zoom account it just takes seconds to make I like how you can create breakout rooms within here take a look at the tutorials that I have I'll go deeper into that I can join a meeting host a meeting with the video on off-screen share only I'm gonna go ahead and just go with video on now at this point you do need to use your first I'm putting on you would have to download and install the app on your computer but after that it will quickly just go through join with computer audio I'm gonna turn my video on here and keep myself muted but if I just go fullscreen here you can see all the different things that you can do at the bottom right across here now you can manage your participants in here you can invite so from here I could go and just deep send them an email they'll get a link from it or I could copy the URL they click on the link and then I just have to accept them into the meeting we have all our different options with our screen share we have our chats and we also have our breakout rooms I didn't make any in here yet but I do like that option inside zoom where you can kind of go around and check out what's happening each room but now with the free for educators 8 to 12 they took off that 40-minute time limit which makes this very attractive to use remember all the

apps that I've showed you so far they're mobile friendly so people can do everything on their phone to connect also with you just like Google classroom so this is a great place that you can keep all your assignments and your materials in one place to easily manage online I'll just click on this demo right here and you can break this into streams where you can communicate where you can be posting questions or videos or material right through here that all your students will get you have class work where you can break it through to your resources depending on do you want to break it down by subjects and then you can add material to each one quickly add all your students in here even email guardians from here and if you click on this you can see how you can email a student and communicate with them and if you click on their name you can dive deeper into different assignments that they have and see which ones they have done or haven't done we have grades in here if you're using that floor mat to keep track of everything again it's all in one place and then if I go back to the very beginning of the stream and you can actually if I go back to all my classes take a look at this one I've turned on Google meat it will give a Google meat a place where you guys can meet virtually just by clicking accessing this link for this Google classroom so do take a look if you're a Google school if this is free to use it's a great place to put everything in to communicate with parents and your students flipgrid is an

excellent way for you to hear students voices online now with this you can see you can sign up for free right from here if there was a question already posted you could enter a flip code now I'm just gonna go into my account just to give you a brief explanation but again check out the tutorials to learn more about this you would create a new topic and then if I go in I'm just gonna go into an example one here you can go and create record a response so if I could do an intro if I go ahead and click on record response make sure if it's the first one you allow the camera access to your camera and your mic on this one but I can record myself here asking the students a question and then they respond in video they can do this on their phone or the computer and then other students can respond to those responses and you control it depending on how much security you wanted and if what you want to see from other students and how they can see other students responses to but you have some options you can see for fun or others filters you can add text to the video and there's video options they have a beta with the screen recording so if there's something on your screen you want to record or do you have a video already created that you could just upload from it but it's a fun way to post a question to your students and then you can track all the data of you can see where people are responding to so do take a look at the tutorial that I created that dives bit deeper into flipgrid this is an excellent way to hear from the students

so now I want to move over to screen recorder so I'm gonna give you some free options here and some of these you can pay for an upgrade to get a few more options but I think they work great for free ones now with this one the first of all is screencastify and all this is going to be an extension you need to use Google Chrome for this can already see that it's already installed and when you go to screencastify com just click on it and it will go through to the chrome store and install it but it's right up top here it's this little guy that gets installed so if I go and click on this right now I'm already logged in and I do have the unlimited one and there's special discounts for education and everything too but the free one I think works great the main thing is that with a free one you can only record five minutes at a time but if you piece together your recordings that can work great too but all you need you can see I have different options I can go ahead and hit record I can size this depending on how big I want this and I have everything ready do I want to I'll just record this and hit share so right now I it's counting down so now it's recording I can go through and do some options do I want to hide the cursor to I want to darken it you can see as I bring it through how it gives the effect I can do some annotating on top of this I can use the eraser but I'm gonna go ahead and stop the sharing now so it goes from this point here and you'll get this where you can do some extra stuff to this you can trim the ends if you drag these scissors back in and what I like about this you could hit save the trim have your quick share options to classroom to publish on YouTube to the embed code and your download options you can export this as an mp4 or audio only or get the shareable link this saves a copy right into your Google Drive that you can get the shareable link and share it that way too but take a look at screencastify you have a more detailed tutorial down below just click the link loom com this is one

I really like and I use this quite a bit sometimes other teachers or people I work will ask for a question especially if I'm working from home and have to send a video and I want to screen sure this is a great way so this is free again for educators in response to the Cova 19 they've made this free for educators and students so make sure to take advantage of that but I'm gonna go get logged in to my loom I'm just gonna log in with my account here and once you're in it's super easy to use so I can go ahead if I want to record something I can go ahead and hit new video I can do a full desktop screen cam you can see there I am appearing here and I can change the size of this one and you can see there's going to be different options through here and when I'm ready to go I can just hit start recording you can either run from a Chrome extension or it's a download on your computer but I can pick the application window or the entire screen so if I was picking this I'm just gonna hit share and it will count down to you through here and when I'm all done and I'm just gonna do a short one here just for an example I'm just gonna hit stop sharing here you have these different videos so in this case all you would have to do is copy this link and send it to people so you can see this was the that was what I just recorded and I know I didn't set it up very well but if I go ahead and copy this link and just send it to somebody they will get they can just view it that quickly and it actually shows me if people clicked on it that they were watching it so this is a great way I'd really recommend this one since it's free really easy to use you can see I can actually trim put call to actions custom thumbnails and a lot more on this so take a look at loom just go to loom comm Adobe spark now this is

a great way to share things online it's great for you to create stuff for your students or for your students to create things to hand in to you can create so many different things you can see from all these different setups they have on templates collages web page slideshows presentations social media posts and other things we can search for templates up and here based on topics and you can start from these and this is what I like it when students can start or even myself I can start from templates because it saves so much time but when you're ready to go even if you want to go from blank I'll go for example this portfolio one and I'm just going to show you how this works really quickly I have some videos coming up that will break down the Adobe spark here too so make sure you stay posted but in this case I can do I want to promote an idea tell what's happening a hero's journey show and tell if I go through and let's say will promote an idea if I pick this one it's gonna set up the slides in a way that it will walk the person through and it even has these tips that will come up I'm just going to close this down but it walks through and helps the student put together as you can see from setting to problem two what could it what could be two solution idea so they don't forget anything and then on each of these this is where they can upload a video they could upload it they could add some text they could add a photo they could add an icon we have time limits on here we can describe so they can use their own voice on here we have options to preview it to share it to download it here and if you have not used in the free one you can collaborate with other people quickly change layout so if you wanted us split screen we have themes we can choose from just by clicking and you'll be able to see how quickly they can change the colors of any of these themes we can resize for square or wired screen and we can even add music so it makes it a great way to create presentations for so many different things like it where I showed you from websites to collages to videos it's fun and it's easy to use so my last

suggestion today is to start a YouTube channel and that's what I did about five years ago I was sharing videos out to my students and it grew from there to helping teachers and so on and I'm still creating videos but you can have a YouTube channel up and running with everything set in about 20 minutes or if you already have a personal channel maybe create a branded account just going up to your icon going to your settings and then you can see a tour manager channels you can create a channel right from there and go through and put up your channel art get in some stuff of information that you want to have written about your YouTube channel so people know what they're gonna find but I do have a detailed tutorial to make sure that you don't forget any of the setup stuff just click on the link that I have down below in the description and I'll walk you through setting up your YouTube channel it's so easy to share videos out that way you can do it from unlisted where only the people will see the videos that you give the link or you can keep it public if you want to so you have some options how you want to share it you have options of live streaming makes a great way to communicate with your students and easy on their phone to watch it for them they're consuming so much YouTube already so I hope you like these 9 suggestions today these 9 websites most of them can be used for free depending on what your organization how it's set up from it or they do have free versions or some of them have upgrades to it too let me know what other things you're using down in the comments down below I'm always looking for new ideas to help people with creating more videos thanks for watching teachers tech this week I'll see you next time with more tech tips and tutorials