When I was in middle and high school, teachers were still experimenting with digital classrooms. In computer labs, instructors would have complete access to our display screens at any time. They could freeze our screens, take control of our desktops, and they had full viewing capabilities.
However, these capabilities were limited to the stationary computer labs. Laptop mobile labs were controlled only by a teacher’s ability to individually monitor screens while unsubtly hovering over our shoulders. Any work done from home was free from the jurisdiction of teachers, and online lessons were unheard of.
The Omnify software suite is SaaS, Android, iPhone, and iPad software. Omnify offers online, business hours, and 24/7 live support. Omnify offers a free version, and free trial. Omnify is appointment scheduling software, and includes features such as class scheduling, facility scheduling, member management, online payments, and staff management. Download this app from Microsoft Store for Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile, Windows 10 Team (Surface Hub). See screenshots, read the latest customer reviews, and compare ratings for Smart Class. Scheduling Software for Mac Virtuagym External Link Square. Virtuagym offers fitness software solutions to personal trainers, independent studios. Schedulicity External Link Square. The most fuss-free, all-in-one online scheduling solution available anywhere. Visual Planning External Link.
Since then, technology has changed and entire lessons are able to be conducted and managed from home if necessary.
Classroom management software and classroom collaboration tools are a part of that change, both of which I will cover in this piece. These tools will improve your ability to manage digital classroom interactions, as well as bring students together for projects and other assignments.
Digital classroom management and other tools don’t have to soak up your budget. You can manage your classroom, instruct individual students, and conduct digital lessons for free with the top free collaboration tools and digital classroom management software.
Free Classroom Management Software
1. Veyon
Veyon is an open-source digital classroom management software built off of iTALC that gives you complete control of your student’s computers, allowing you to display lessons, aid in corrections, view workstation progress, and lock out particular users.
The first impression I had about Veyon was how clean the user interface was for a free and open-source software. Veyon is visually pleasing and straightforward with 3D icons, simple prompts, and easy navigation. Adding to its user-friendly nature, Veyon is also easy to install and run on any major operating system (Windows, Linux, OSX).
Key features for Veyon include an overview mode for classroom supervision, the ability to power on and off workstations, send messages to workstations, broadcast screens, and perform homeschool broadcasting.
Have you used Veyon? Be sure to leave a review!
2. LanSchool Lite
LanSchool Lite is a digital classroom management software offered by Lenovo that is a free version of their full LanSchool program. This option is light on features, as its name suggests, and is unavailable for Chromebooks unless one purchases the full LanSchool software.
That being said, it has a clean user interface which allows users to monitor up to 3,000 screens. Where LanSchool Lite falls short of other software, such as Veyon, is the limited interaction with the monitored screens. With LanSchool Lite you can view screens in real-time, view their active applications and last visited website, and you are able to arrange the screens in any order you desire.
Unfortunately, functionality and features end there. In order to unlock interactive features, you must purchase the full LanSchool software.
Have you used LanSchool? Be sure to leave a review!
3. MyVision Free
MyVision Free is another digital classroom management software offered by Netop. This software not only allows you to supervise your student’s computer screens, but also gives you the ability to take control of those screens and lock out their usage remotely.
The user interface for MyVision is clean and simple, with easy to use functionality buttons on its top bar as well as an auto-arrangement feature for screens.
MyVision Free is available for both Mac computers and PCs.
Free Classroom Collaboration Tools
These are tools that are useful when running a digital classroom, whether you are broadcasting your screen onto all displays or each student is contributing their own actions in a collaborative app. All apps are free!
4. Bubbl
Bubbl is a collaborative mind-mapping tool for generating new ideas and concepts in the classroom. This tool is also useful for classroom presentations, especially for class discussions and activities. The free version allows up to three mind maps at a time, all of which are savable and shareable.
Bubbl is an online tool; no installation required.
Have you used Bubbl? Be sure to leave a review!
5. Wiggio
Wiggio is a collaborative workshop tool that offers group messaging, calendars, group polls, file sharing, and virtual meetings.
This tool is perfect for those who choose LanSchool Lite as their free classroom management software in order to make up for the lack of interactive and collaborative features. This way you can still monitor your students and keep in contact with them even while they are working remotely.
Have you used Wiggio? Be sure to leave a review!
6. Cacoo
Cacoo is a free diagram and flowchart creator made specifically for real-time collaboration. This app is perfect for visual learning in the classroom and off-site so long as teachers and students have an internet connection. Cacoo also integrates with other free educational programs such as G Suite for Education, allowing for easier sharing and access to information.
Have you used Cacoo? Be sure to leave a review!
7. Edmodo
Think of Edmodo as social media for teachers, students, and parents. Teachers can assign work, students are able to complete the work, and performance assessments and lesson plans are available to all parties.
Parents can know what their children are working on, and how well they are performing now that all three main aspects of education are on a collaborative platform.
Scheduling Software Comparison
Edmodo is also able to integrate with G Suite for Education, making assignments easier to submit and view.
This tool is growing in popularity with over 48 million users worldwide.
Have you used Edmodo? Be sure to leave a review!
For further exploration into Edmodo, be sure to read this comparison: Moodle vs. Edmodo vs. Blackboard: The Ultimate LMS Comparison
Other classroom tools and guides
It is amazing just how far digital learning has come in the past decade. As education moves increasingly from in-person learning to the digital world we should all prepare for this.
The Capterra school administration blog is full of guides and resources in order to help you with this transition to digital, such as these pieces:
Have you used any of these free digital classroom tools? Are there any others you would recommend for our list? Let us know in the comments below!
Free Classroom Scheduling Software
Looking for School Administration software? Check out Capterra's list of the best School Administration software solutions.
Splendid City Team Sports Scheduler and Sports Scheduling Software System is useful for people who organize team sport events. Use it to manage/publish sports schedules of any size and complexity.
scs.dmg.gz
Niagara Software
Freeware (Free)
3.03 Mb
Mac PPC
Turns your idle computer screen into an airplane window, complete with a moving aerial view. Each time it plays, the screensaver creates a unique flight sequence.Realistic, gentle animation and superb photography make it a truly distinctive screen. ...
HP2Coach.dmg
Idle Time Software
Freeware (Free)
5.7 Mb
Mac OS X 10.4 or later
Student Life Organizer 1 functions as a program to make the chaos of college life easier. It has a class scheduler/information manager to help students schedule their classes and keep important information about the class. It gives you the means to. ...
Student Life Organizer
AddaxSoft
Freeware (Free)
533 Kb
Windows Vista, Windows 95, Windows Me, Window
F-Script is an award winning set of open source tools that complement Xcode and Interface Builder to provide scripting and interactive access to Cocoa frameworks and custom Objective-C objects. It aims to be a useful and fun tool for both beginners. ...
F-Script20091026.zip
Philippe Mougin
Freeware (Free)
25.7 Mb
Mac OS X 10.5 or later
For many of you, you may have noticed how much slower networking seems to be in vista.Well your not the only ones. I have a gigabit network and was only getting 8mb/s transfersand when I played any audio (I listen to music when I work) it would lower down to 1 - 2mb/s.
Vista_Networking_Tweaks.zip
PCWinTech
Freeware (Free)
10 Kb
Win Vista
Splendid City Team Sports Scheduler and Sports Scheduling Software System is useful for people who organize team sport events. Use it to manage/publish sports schedules of any size and complexity. Automatically create high quality double or single. ...
scs.dmg.gz
UB
Freeware (Free)
11.1 Mb
Mac OS X 10.2.6 or later
Automate your FTP tasks with this JAVA based FTP Scheduler. Create multiple upload or download sessions, proxy support (http, https, socks), session watchdog, FTP in ascii, binary, passive or active mode, overwrite, delete, log transfers, append. ...
FTP Scheduler 2.1.1 forMAC.dmg
Mywebmymail dot com
Freeware (Free)
1024 Kb
Mac OS X 10.5 or later
Class Reunion is able to appeal lots of users as a convenient and helpful audio score for Adobe Soundbooth. Class Reunion is a free Soundbooth score that you can use on your Mac. Follow these steps to correctly make use of it:Launch Soundbooth. ...
ClassReunion.zip
Adobe Systems Incorporated
Freeware (Free)
43.6 Mb
Mac OS X
Free scheduling software to schedule your MS-project files, your Omniplan files and your Excel files. Our free scheduler is available for Mac and Windows. Automatically allocate your resources without any over-allocation. Scheduling is the automatic. ...
planningforce_express_scheduler.exe
Intelligent Software Company
Freeware (Free)
80.11 Mb
Mac OS X, Win7 x32, WinVista, WinXP
Features a world-class collection of pre-compiled and ready to use UNIX compatible software which are not available from a fresh installation of Mac OS X but are popular among other UNIX environments. Here you can find utilities, programming. ...
Rudix-2009.dmg
Rudix
Freeware (Free)
244 Mb
Mac OS X 10.5 or later
Code and utilities for doing mac-specific development in Java. This will include bridges for spotlight and quiclook (written in C) that will invoke Java class to do the work.
Java Tools For Mac
Jonathan Maron, Tim Gleason
Freeware (Free)
Windows
Solway's Task Scheduler is a small program which enables you to start other programs automatically, or play (say) music files, or run batch files, periodically and at pre-defined times. This program functions very well in combination with backup soft. ...