What is digital duct tape?  

As I see it, digital duct tape is the act of creating or improvising problem-solving with basic technology tools to solve a teaching challenge.   By including digital tools to create solutions to educational problems, you open opportunities to level– up your online teaching materials , in class instruction, and assessments.   The following are a few tools and methods that may assist you as you create learning events or facilitate lessons. There is a follow-up post coming soon with more of these types of suggestions.  

Join us for a TESL Ontario webinar that demonstrates and explores these and more concepts on the Tutela network, October 22, 2025, 7:00 – 8:00 pm EDT.  

read on for more details

Placeholders  

While developing learning objects, creating a layout for documents or presentations, or designing a website, content is an important part of the development process. To assist with this there are online resources that allow a teacher-developer to set placeholders for text, images, and video.  

Picsum Photos at https://picsum.photos provide images set to a specific dimension to ensure they fit your requirements. Images can be altered with filters such as greyscale or blur. Additional advanced features are available as well. 

Lorem Ipsum at https://www.lipsum.com is a site that generates text blocks for a developer’s needs and produces nonsense text that can be pasted into whitespace, tables, lists, within documents under development. The developer can return to this text to replace them with true content later.  

Video Placeholder at https://www.videoplaceholder.com is a collection of 8 videos that can be placed in your digital learning objects as placeholders until access to the real videos are available.  

Simple text first 

Make it a habit to write your text content in simple text format and then add that text to development apps such as H5P, Canva, Poodll, Moodle and Clipchamp. Many developers create text content in word processors with full formatting. In many applications, the formatting is confused and elements such as fonts, line spacing, lists, and columns will not appear as expected in multimedia editors. So, just type the content in a simple text editor such as Notepad and save the document. When ready, paste the content into the multimedia app or learning management editor. There will be fewer formatting oddities and underlying code that may appear in the code editor. 

Coordinate colours 

Colour families are essential to a professional and visually accessible presentation. Graphic designers spend their careers ensuring that colours enhance their products. As an educational developer you can use the coolors app at https://coolors.co to create colour palettes for your learning objects. There are several ways to create a palette. One is to upload a photo or logo and coolors generates colour palettes for your project. Another is to set the primary colour by locking it and then complementary colours are generated.  These can be adjusted individually or through using the Adjust palette tool. After you have your colours, copy them and use them in the multimedia editor. 

Locate legal media 

Find reliable and consistent web-spaces that offer legal media. The Openverse at https://openverse.org offers 800 million images, photos, and audio files. With a search bar on the front page, and options for the type of media required, it is simple to find content. These results can be filtered by license, source and many more criteria. 

Locate alternate online tools (sites like…) 

Identify a tool or resource that has the utility required for preparing or delivering online lessons. For example, for image editing, Photoshop is not always practical as it may be too expensive for many educators. To find alternatives to Photoshop, open Google and then type “sites like Photoshop.” The Google search will return a list of alternatives.

Convert PowerPoint presentations to video 

Instructors commonly have access to Microsoft PowerPoint. If they do not, they can access a free version of Office at https://www.office.com and sign up with a free account. To make PowerPoint slideshows more accessible online, consider changing them into videos. First open the document and remove unnecessary content.  This can be text, decorative images, embedded videos and complex backgrounds.  Slideshows present better as a video when content and visuals are concise. An option is to add a layer of audio to the PowerPoint. A teacher can record audio over each slide within the presentation. After edits and recording have been completed, export the presentation to video format. This video can be shared with students through a hyperlink embedded in an LMS course or during a screen-share in a live online classroom. 

Optimizing images 

Optimizing images refers to the practice of changing digital images to achieve a balance between visual quality and storage size.  The objective is to present images that are clear and in their original perspective, while not taking too much digital space. This will make viewing your course more efficient which accommodates students with limited bandwidth. Webresizer at https://webresizer.com allows teachers to upload an image and make quick adjustments. A preview window allows the user to compare the original image with the optimized version. The optimized version can be downloaded and used in your online course. 

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TESL Ontario webinar 

Join us for a TESL Ontario webinar that demonstrates and explores these and more concepts on the Tutela network, October 22, 2025, 7:00 – 8:00 pm EDT.  

More information can be found here at https://teslontario.org/webinars/digital-duct-tape-for-language-instructors