Online learning has penetrated nearly all fields of education.
With modern technology, it has become effortless to study, and students do not spend hours and hours just reading books all the time. Conversely, it can be difficult to make themselves work without any supervision. But there are ways to inject some discipline into your students’ online studying.
Emotional Intelligence is important for motivation and setting goals while studying. First, students should understand their emotions such as anger, laziness or lack of perseverance and learn how to cope with them. That is vital for performing online tasks productively.
Besides, you can always use apps and websites to smooth the supervision of online learning process. Below you can find a bunch of tools for those teachers who are involved into online learning.
Respondus Lockdown Browser
This is a browser that blocks other sites, thus helps secure online exams. Although it is linked to many learning management systems, students are unable to access or visit other websites, applications, and even peek into class notes. This allows them to perform tests in a precise way and there is no way for cheating to occur. This resource is easy to use for the teachers. It only takes a few minutes to install.
Self Control
Mac computers give your learners a great chance to stay focused on their work with a Self Control application. It simply blocks other sites and all the distracting e-mails so students can feel comfortable and become fully engaged with assignments and more productive work. Even when users restart their computers, the application still works. It is paramount for learners to be attentive and not miss any important thought or idea that will enrich their paper or save time for effective knowledge intake.
RefWorks
RefWorks is a reference management service created in 2001 to help students and teachers make their research papers brilliant. While writing your work, you can effortlessly import references from your online database. You can also instantly create bibliographies. The Import Filters help import references from other databases. When you write your paper with RefWorks, your authorship and periodical references are created automatically.
Unicheck (earlier Unplag)
Although most students and professors are aware of the potential punishments for plagiarism, there are still many cases of it. With plagiarism detection tools there are lots of possibilities to prevent plagiarism by just checking a paper here. It precisely reports text similarities found in student papers. As a teacher, you also have the benefits of this plagiarism checker’s ability to store all student works in folders with each student’s contact details and history of checks. Unicheck (earlier Unplag) is a huge helper as it allows teachers to save their time and check up to five student works simultaneously.
Mendeley
Another resource to help your students avoid plagiarism is Mendeley. It helps students create and manage citations in their works. This resource also provides the unique possibility of sharing your research with others. Whether you are a researcher or a student, you can safely share your paper with others and see what they think of it. You can also put your papers in your profile and see who is reading your research papers. The readers may be from anywhere and everywhere around the world.
Keystroke Dynamics
KeyTrac traces the manner and rhythm of the individual typing. It helps define a biometric template for an individual, allowing them to be identified by the way they use a keyboard when writing. The application processes the keystroke timing through a unique algorithm, making it a valuable way of adding a layer of security to the online learning environment.
Google Scholar
If you want to be sure that all the literature sources your learners use relate to your field of study without spending hours on searching for the right resources, have them try Google Scholar. This mechanism works by ranking the most relevant books, articles and other sources so that the most suitable ones to your search are listed first. Learners can also keep all the necessary literature sources and citations in special folders. Students can also set alerts as well to get updates on new relevant sources.
Summing Up
At first glance, it seems depressing to observe how your students sit at computers to study, but today Google and a huge number of other tools and applications offer a variety of means to study efficiently. You can get your learners to concentrate on the learning process without as much effort by leveraging today’s available technologies. There is no need to stand around keeping an eye on your students while testing them. Also assessment is now a matter of minutes instead of hours, and that saves everyone significant amounts of time. With tools that help find related information within seconds, students are more focused on thinking over the topic and developing it rather than spending hours searching through physical books.
