DETROIT – The education sector has remained heavily reliant on traditional classroom-based learning until the recent COVID-19 pandemic made it dangerous to students, teachers, and school staff alike.

While that threat is gradually becoming manageable, the fact remains that online learning is not only feasible, it may also potentially become the future of education. What is currently clear is the fact that teachers need to bolster their toolset by taking education training that help accommodate online learning sessions. The following tools are some of the most important basics that all educators should have.

Progress Tracker

One of the most tedious aspects of teaching comes in the form of clerical duties regarding student progress reports. While this is not a difficult task, it can quickly become overwhelming depending on the number of classes a single teacher handles. The recording of data alone can take up valuable time and attention that could have otherwise been used to help lagging students. Tools such as SpedTrack software can help teachers track student progress and compliance, which will help teachers minimize the number of course failures.

Productivity Suite

While there are plenty of productivity-oriented internet tools to choose from, Google Suites is by far the most complete, most popular, and most utilized. This toolkit includes Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, which are enough for most teachers. The benefit of using a popular toolkit is that the chances that your co-teachers are using them  are high, which makes collaboration easier and more organized.

Project Management Software

Project Management Software (PMS) is essential for large collaborative projects such as research papers and term requirements. PMS options such as Asana grant users the ability to streamline collaboration, track milestones and their completion progress, and set deadlines for each section of the project.

Virtual Assistants

The clerical duties of a teacher can take away precious time and attention from actual teaching duties. Virtual assistants can help lighten the load by assisting with research, clerical duties, and other tasks. This allows teachers to focus on providing quality lesson materials to their students and it also helps them give much-needed focus to struggling students.

Web Security Software

While schools may not seem like a likely target for cyber attacks, the fact that they are a treasure trove of private data makes them a prime target. They are especially vulnerable in an online learning model because of the sheer number of vulnerabilities that hackers can potentially exploit. Each student and teacher is a potential vulnerability that hackers can use to gain access to the school’s database.

Web security software is essential to preventing criminals from gaining unauthorized access to your personal files and those of the school. Antivirus software and firewalls are potent enough as long as they are regularly updated.

It’s also important to establish cybersecurity habits to further minimize the risk of getting compromised. The cybercrime threat will only worsen if the education sector completely adapts an online learning model. While the chances of this happening is arguable, this does not discount the importance of having reliable cybersecurity measures in place, especially considering our ever-increasing reliance on the internet.

This article was provided by James Hunt.