Basic tech tools every student should master

It’s the 21^st century, and obviously, the education system shouldn’t be the same old boring routine. With all the technological innovations, as expected, new tools have been designed to make the learning experience so much easier and even fun. Such that students could be more motivated to learn, and have an increased comprehension rate. Here are a few tech tools every student would need and should learn to use, for an effective education process in these times.

ZOOM

Right since the Covid pandemic happened in 2019, so many educational institutions began to adapt to online teaching. It was in such times that zoom (along with its similar counterparts; skype and GoToMeeting) became a prominent interface for online meetings, classes, and conferences. Being highly regarded for its availability of interactive features that make an online class more effective. Zoom offers High-quality conference calls (both video and Voice-only), enables content sharing, class collaboration, even the possibility of recording sessions, plus an extra chat-room feature. Their services are accessible for free, though restricted. With different price ranges for paid plans; which determine how many features you’ll be given access to.

EVERNOTE

Talk of a Notebook with superpowers. Evernote is an online note-taking app with multiple amazing features every student must-have. It’s an effective tool that takes teaching, learning, and collaborative exercises to a whole new level. With features ranging from organized workspaces; that allow you to create multiple notebooks and store them in folders for ease of access, to real-time collaboration features; that allow students to work together on assignments and even link with teachers too, for easier corrections and assessments. You are also enabled to take notes in multiple formats like texts, audios, videos, pictures, or marked webpage clippings. Evernote also comes with Stylus compatibility for free-form drafts. Evernote also offers features like; document searches, helps you scan your handwritten notes or important documents and add them to your notebook folder for ease of access, can extract text from images for faster note-taking.

MS POWERPOINT

This is one basic tool every student would obviously need to learn to use. It is a slide designing tool, which if learned well allows you to collate, preview, and present projects with such ease and excellence that it should be illegal. With features that enable you to insert Pictures, Videos, Sounds, Animated words, and slide transition animations, multi-themes, amongst other thrilling add-ons. You also have access to real-time collaborative features that enable co-creating and co-editing for more effective group projects. They are available for Mac, PC, and even have IOS and Android versions. They also have both free and paid plans, dependent on what features you’ll need.

KAHOOT

Talk about learning made fun. Kahoot is a gamified educational software with over 60 million users in about 200 countries. Over half of the teachers in the US use Kahoot in their teaching exercises. Other than creating fun games and quizzes on any topic, with multiple-choice questions that can be projected for students to compete. It allows users to create a personal account from the app or website, adds a title description with an image, creates and hosts games live or send the link as a challenge. It also enables teachers to store and track each student’s performance and accomplishments over time. It’s an effective tool for grading and even offers different language options. Plus, its pricing is free for educators.

GOOGLE DRIVE

One major need every student would have is to store and share files with one another. Google drive is just the platform for that. Compatible with typically every device, Good drive lets you store and share large files with ease. You could create documents, spreadsheets, presentation slides, survey forms, drawings, and then easily sort and store them in different folders. It is also important to know how to convert to pdf in case you want to store or share files in an unmodifiable/non-editable format.

FINAL THOUGHTS

With these tech tools, amongst many others (and even much more still in development), we can expect the student learning and comprehension graph to take an upwards hike in the coming times. As students would come to have a different- more encouraging view towards education, and the learning process made more effective.