Digital classrooms have become more ingrained in our society than ever before. The pandemic forced the world to switch to remote work, and that included teaching and studying as well.

Since then, digital classrooms have become more commonplace, but they are still not widespread due to the inherent difficulties associated with them.

It's hard for students to focus on their studies when taking classes from their bedrooms. For teachers, it is harder to manage everything when it becomes purely digital. So, how can teachers and students stay ahead of such problems and excel in the digital classroom? Let's find out.

Tips For Educators To Stay Ahead in a Digital Classroom

When shifting from a traditional teaching environment to a digital classroom, teachers will have issues related to controlling the class and staying effective and organized. Here's what they can do to improve their performance.

1. Embrace the Tools

For educators to ensure they have an organized digital classroom where they can effectively teach students, they must embrace technology. Today, there are plenty of tools that can help with managing and organizing digital classrooms.

For example, an LMS system. LMS stands for learning management system, and it is a kind of portal where teachers and educators can create classes, register students for them, and provide the syllabus. They can also provide the schedule for the classes and update students on their test results and grades.

Teachers will also need a platform for live communication with their students in order to provide lectures. The platform needs to have screen sharing and whiteboard capabilities.

Teachers should know how to use these tools, and it's the administration's job to provide training on how to use them. These are simple measures that are required for educators to stay ahead in the digital classroom.

2. Learn To Convert Physical Docs to Digital Ones

Moving from a traditional classroom to a digital one comes with its own caveats. One of the more difficult aspects of this transition is converting your teaching notes, assignments, and quizzes into a digital form.
Before we had OCR (optical character recognition), converting a physical document to a digital one was a completely manual task. Nowadays, any good OCR converter like imagetotextconverter.net or imagetotext.me can do the same in minutes (if not seconds).

All you have to do is take a picture of your document and upload it to an online image-to-text converter. You will receive all the text in the image in the form of a Text or Word file, which you can save and alter later.
Utilizing such tools is paramount for staying ahead in the digital classroom as you transition from traditional learning.

3. Engage Students With Interactive Platforms

One of the biggest challenges of teaching is to keep the students focused. Younger students often have a difficult time focusing on their studies. After all, studying is boring and not interesting. They would rather do something else that is more fun.

To keep such students engaged, it is vital that teachers incorporate the use of interactive platforms. There are plenty of those around, such as Kahoot, Quizizz, and EdPuzzle.

An interactive platform basically gamifies studying. It provides a bunch of quizzes and learning exercises in the guise of a game. Students love playing games, so they are more likely to stay invested in the lesson.

Learn how to use such platforms and make the most of them to keep your students engaged.

4. Learn to Organize and Automate (have folders for work, assignments, grading, etc., automate repetitive tasks)

Working online requires a lot of self-discipline. It is very easy to lose track of important tasks when you are as busy as teachers usually are. So, you need to learn how to organize your workflow and automate many of the menial, time-consuming tasks to stay ahead.

Here are some examples of what you can do.

• Have an organized file and folder structure on your computer. Keep the study notes, turned assignments, exam grades, quizzes, and lecture slides in their separate folders.
• Make sure to add the date of all files in their names.
• Keeps the materials of different classes in different folders.
• Store everything in one place, instead of having a bunch of files littered in different emails, devices, and cloud services.

That's it for organizing. Now, let's see what teachers can automate to improve their online classes.

Attendance. Instead of taking attendance manually every day, teachers can use the LMS to set up a time for automatic attendance. Anyone who comes in time will be marked, while late attendees will be flagged.

Grading of simple tests and quizzes. Some tests and quizzes are purely multiple-choice questions with a predetermined correct answer. Some LMS and software like Google Classroom can automatically grade such tests and provide the answers to the students. This can help teachers save some time on grading.

Create spreadsheets that let you add up your students' scores and maintain a record of their grades throughout the school year.

Stuff like this will help you stay on top of your work and keep up with your teaching duties.

Tips for Students To Stay Ahead in a Digital Classroom

Students have issues focusing on their studies and not giving in to distractions. The lack of accountability also makes it easier to get away with tardy behavior until it is too late. Here's how they can stay ahead in a digital classroom.

1. Set up a Distraction-Free Space

Tip number one is to ensure you are in a distraction-free environment. Distractions can be anything that forces or tempts you to take away your attention from the digital class.

Common examples include:

• Gaming consoles
• TV
• Smartphones
• Other people
• Noisy environment

To obtain a distraction-free environment, you can either study in the guest room of your house/apartment, or you can go to the public library. Public libraries provide free internet, so you can take your classes there. Just be sure to use headphones or earbuds to avoid disturbing other people.

2. Use Smart Note Taking Tools

Students should focus on understanding the lectures rather than worry about taking down everything on the screen to study it later. They can do this by using apps like OneNote or Notion.

If you find paying for such an app difficult, you can take screenshots of the lecture and use a free image-to-text converter to turn them into digital notes later.

Using such tools will help students stay ahead of their lectures and relieve a lot of mental pressure and stress.

3. Ensure You Have Good Internet Bandwidth

Digital classes are held with the help of the internet. So, students have to ensure that they have enough bandwidth (speed) to keep up with their class without lagging out.

Typically, for video calls, you need a 100 Mbps download speed and 10 Mbps upload speed to experience no lag or call drops. Students can test whether they have enough bandwidth by doing an internet speed test.

Sometimes, the student may have enough bandwidth, but it won't be available to them because others are using the same connection. A speed test will also reveal that the speed will appear slower than normal.

In this case, the student must come to an arrangement with other members of the house to minimize their bandwidth usage while classes are going on.

4. Utilize Cloud Storage

Just like how teachers have issues with organizing and managing their files for different classes and pupils, students have such problems too.

Students should use a free cloud storage option like Google Drive or OneDrive to store their homework, assignments, and study notes. The material for each subject should be in its own folder, and all files should have their date of creation in their name.

This will make finding your work easy later on using built-in search functions. It also safeguards your work from getting lost in case of any kind of hardware failure.

Conclusion

So, there you have it, the problems teachers and students may face in a digital classroom and how they can stay ahead of them. The crux of the matter is to embrace the useful technologies that make the whole experience more convenient and to exercise good habits while using them. At the end, everyone will be better off by applying these tips, whether they be teachers or students.