Best Video Calling App for Online Teaching - Free Software for School College Teacher - Live Classes

The pandemic has disrupted the education system with schools being shut down indefinitely. In the new normal, online classes have emerged to be the way forward to keep the system going without posing any health risks to the students. This migration to the virtual classroom environment has posed a new set of challenges to teachers the world over like choosing the right kind of software for online video classes, managing student performance remotely, distribution, review and assessment of homeworks, and a lot more.

To help teachers in having a smooth transition into online teaching, we have collated a list of the best platforms offering comprehensive teaching solutions. These apps are a one-stop junction for your teaching with useful features that will help you conduct classes online with ease. Presented below are the top five apps that are highly recommended by users for their simplicity and usefulness.

GOOGLE CLASSROOM

This 100% free software for schools designed by Google comes with a 100 GB of storage space allowing teachers to collate, store, and distribute lessons along with assignments to students very easily. You can use google hangouts (up to 25 people at a time) along with it to conduct live video classes. This platform also helps track progress and homework completion by providing customizable access to students, teachers, and parents, thereby making it hassle-free for any user. This even allows you to create quizzes, grade students more efficiently, and interact with them through messaging during the class. Another interesting feature worth mentioning is that it can be easily integrated with any other app to help augment the class according to the teacher's choice, making the class or presentation much more interesting and livelier and increasing student engagement. Along with Google classroom, there is also G-Suite for education that is extremely useful in making your teaching online better.

WizIQ

A complete package covering all the essential features required for online classes, WizIQ is a platform that has carefully curated services to give the user a seamless experience. It helps schedule, manage and monitor live sessions, allows learners to attend live sessions on the go on their smartphone itself using its android or iOS app, enables you to easily record your live sessions, which you can email or share via social later, allows live screen sharing and much more. WizIQ software can be integrated with your internet browser without the need to download or install anything. This platform is ideal for all teachers who want to provide the best learning experience to their students. You may take a free trial and if you like it you can purchase the pay per user plan. 

UDEMY

Not just classroom teaching you can sell professional courses to the audience worldwide. A very popular platform, Udemy allows the easy creation of courses within minutes and you can include all types of documents, PowerPoint presentations, photos, and everything else that you may need in your lecture or course.  All this is available to you for no cost! Create a course and publish it for the thousands of students out there. Along with this, an interactive virtual classroom feature is the main highlight of this software that allows teachers to host live teaching sessions online. Udemy also has other useful tools like  live whiteboard, instructor dashboard, presentation viewer, and file-sharing component which makes the session an active and involved experience. Use this across platforms and also with multiple language support to gain a personalized teaching online. 

ZOOM

This app has gained a lot of user base during the ongoing pandemic as the go-to video conferencing app for almost everyone. Apart from just providing a good video chat option, Zoom gives you a customizable virtual room for classes. With great moderator controls, this application has all the new features like private group sessions with password protection, interactive whiteboard for your online class, and  the ability to accommodate multiple users at once without crashing or breaking connections. This is a free app, easy to use, and can be navigated with self-explanatory instructions making it a very user-friendly platform for teachers (free for upto at total of 20 members). 

SCHOOLOGY

Schoology is a smart platform that has been designed by combining multiple functions to make a one-stop app that can do everything with the click of the finger. Putting together features like advanced analytics and collaboration, teachers can streamline their lessons, hand out assignments, and track their students’ progress very easily. This LMS platform allows the teachers to share insights with parents, making it a very immersive and real-world classroom like learning.  Teachers can also browse resources offered by other instructors for their reference and also integrate other tools into the app to make the classes more exciting. The basic version of Schoology is free for use and has all the required features.