We feel that an educator’s reach should extend beyond the classroom, and one of the best ways to accomplish this is by creating an app that coincides with your classes. Phones nowadays are more than just a way to contact your friends and family.  They may get a bad rap in the classroom, but outside of the classroom they can be a powerful tool to keep your students engaged. Whether you’re a K-12 educator, a college professor, or a tutor, you’ll find that an app can be symbiotic with your classes. In this article we’ll go over some great features that can help you improve interaction and communication outside of the classroom with an Educational app.

When you’re first navigating through our system, it can be a bit daunting thanks to the vast possibilities of what can be done with your app. That's why we’ve put together a list of some features that you can start off with which we feel will help get you on the right path to creating an amazing app for you and your classes!

Ever pass out a syllabus only to have all your students lose it? Or announce an important test date only to see nobody write it down? This issue can be resolved by simply adding all of that information into your app so that they can access it at any time. Our Text WYSIWYG feature allows you to insert important information, links, and images pertaining to your classes directly into the app.
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Do you want to incorporate study cards, or flashcards into your app? You can add these with our Image Gallery and Flashcards features which allow you to add some visual learning options for your students who learn better in that format. You can also integrate video lessons with our YouTube and Vimeo features if you have videos on those platforms.

If you have other web-based content, you can use our WebView and PDF Viewer features to bring that content into your app. These give you the ability to make your app chocked full of all the important information your students need. 

Along with these features you can include copies of full lesson presentations with our Seminar and Lecture Notes feature which allows your users to bookmark and add their own personal notes to the lessons in-app.
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All of these features are great ways to bring class-related content into your app!

School spirit is important too! To encourage students to go to school events you can have your school’s calendar available at their fingertips with the Events Feed and the Events Manual feature.

You may ask what’s the difference between those two features? We’re glad you asked! The Events Manual Feature allows you to manually input events into the in-app calendar via the App Dashboard, while the Event Feed Feature allows you to add events to the in-app calendar by syncing it with an iCal link. 

You can pair these features with our Places 2.0 feature which allows you to include a list of places that can help encourage learning outside of the classroom. Are there some great museums or historical sites related to your classes’ subjects? Give your students an easy way to find where those are located. If those places have special events coming up, you can let your students know about them with the Events features.

Our Social Wall feature allows students and teachers to be easier to reach than by email, while being less intrusive than giving out their personal phone number. Anyone who interacts with a social wall will receive a notification whenever someone else posts or comments. This allows multiple users to ask questions in an environment where they can see all of the other questions asked and answered. 

This is perfect for if someone else has the same question. It’s also be a safe and secure network by requiring a login before posting, so everyone can keep track of who’s saying what, and if you need to remove an abusive poster and their messages, you can easily ban users and delete their messages.

Do you need an easy way for your students to schedule times to meet with you? With our Calendly and YouCanBook.Me features you can easily give your students the ability to schedule one-on-one time with you if you have accounts with those services.

You can also keep your students engaged with our Loyalty feature. While it was created for business loyalty programs in mind, we’ve been impressed with seeing all the creative ways our users have used it in other unique ways. You can use it to encourage regular participation in your class by offering up different rewards that your students can redeem once they accrue enough points in the app.
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Along with encouraging regular participation, you can use our TypeForm, JotForm, or Google Forms features to offer extra credit to your students, or provide practice tests for them to take. Do you want to encourage them to visit the local museums? Create a form to fill out with extra credit as an incentive!

Another great way to connect with your students is through Push Notifications. With our system you have complete control over your notifications. You can send out scheduled notifications, create notification groups that deal with specific topics that users can subscribe to, as well as set up automatic notifications. We also have the GeoFence feature that allows you to send out locations-based notifications. Have interesting historical facts about places around town? You can set up a notification to trigger whenever someone gets within a certain distance of that location which can help enhance the knowledge that they’ve already gained in your classroom.

If it seems like they’re always on their phones, instead of try to fight it, why not work with it? It might seem counterintuitive to some educators to create an app for the classroom, but we hope you’re now convinced of how it might work!

These are just a small handful of features that you can use in your app to help expand communication and participation with your students. We have many more features in our system, and we encourage you to check out all of the amazing features that we offer so that you can make the best app for your class!

Have additional questions? We’re here to help. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions you may have.