MS Journalism: A New Era in Education: Apps Make Online Learning Easier

Posted: 29/05/2020

By: Mya Bao and Koko Zhang

Did you know that there are apps that can help you study, not just kill aliens? Today, we are going to take a look at some apps that you can use to improve your studies. Some of them you might have heard about before, but students and teachers just love them so much that we are going to feature them and see what others think about these apps!

The first app that students and teachers recommend is Zoom. Zoom, a video conferencing app, has won many awards worldwide, and is now the app of choice for online “live” classes. Because of the COVID-19 novel coronavirus, students around the world are forced to stay at home and do online classes. There are a lot of different online video conferencing apps, but SMIC ET Middle School uses Zoom for its classes. From April 20th, ET Middle School started having a half-day of Zoom meeting classes every weekday from Monday to Friday. “I think the Zoom app we are using is a quite helpful,” said Daniel Wang from E7-2.  “The design of the app is simple and easy to control, and during a lesson, everyone can share their screen with others, which I think is very useful,” he said. Teachers seem to like Zoom too. Teacher JC Casim thinks that Zoom is a very stable app for learning and teaching. Even though Daniel likes Zoom, he thinks it should allow teachers to invite the students into the “classroom,” so they will not be late to class anymore.

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The second app that students and teachers recommend is PowerSchool. PowerSchool is an online learning platform that has an app for iOS and Android. It lets students track their assignments and grades, submit homework, and even communicate with teachers and peers. E7-3 Coco Lei said, “PowerSchool is important because you submit most all of your work on it, and you have the due dates listed. It helps you organize your time so you can have more leisure [if] you finish all your work in time.” Hank Pan from E8-2 also thinks that PowerSchool is helpful because it tells him what homework has been assigned.

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The third app is Forest. Forest is designed to help students manage their time and stay focused. Whenever students want to focus on their work, they “plant a seed” in the app. “The trees are planted when you are focusing on one thing in a period that you set. Once the clock is on, you cannot go to any other apps or else the tree will die,” explained Coco Lei. She thinks the app is really good for helping students focus on learning. The app even plants a tree in real life when a student’s tree grows to a certain size!

The fourth app students recommend is Quizlet. Quizlet allows students to study and learn with different kinds of games. Reyna Bao from E6-2 said, “I think that the app ‘Quizlet’ is super helpful because there are different flashcards and then they test you many times to make you remember that thing or vocabulary.” 

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In this long period, because of COVID-19, teachers in SMIC ET Middle School are using a free and easy alternative to Photoshop: GIMP. GIMP is an open-source graphics editor used for image editing and viewing. Some teachers in ET Middle School use GIMP for editing images and put them into PowerPoints for online teaching. “It’s free, and everything is easy to use. Viewing and editing photos is very simple on GIMP,” said Teacher Matthew Parsons.

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These are just some of the apps that teachers and students recommended to help with work and studies. If you have any other recommendations, please leave a comment below! We may even feature your recommendations in a future article!

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