67 Essential EdTech Tools

Technology and education is a winning combination that truly helps teachers. These teaching tools streamline the process, help to manage the different aspects of teaching, and create teaching materials that would almost be impossible to do manually. New EdTech tools are constantly launched, or older versions are upgraded with new features.

With their busy schedule teacher don’t always have the time to research new EdTech tools. To assist teachers, we’ve created a list of essential EdTech Tools.

Lesson Preparing EdTech Tools

Preparing a lesson to teach students takes time and effort. Here are 25 EdTech Tools that will help teachers in preparing and teaching.

  1. Nearpod includes over 6,500 ready to teach lessons that are customizable. Interactive activities on devices include drawing on the whiteboard, responding to open-ended questions, quizzes, polls, and sharing ideas in real-time. Features include immediate student feedback and grading of assignments.
  2. Go Noodle gamifies exercises and movement in the classroom. The pre-recorded videos help kids do physical activities at the beginning of a lesson, as a break or to use for homework.
  3. Book Creator creates eBooks for usages as teaching resources. Updating material is easy. Learners can create eBooks as portfolios, homework assignments or compile lessons or stories.
  4. Wakelet is a platform to collect and share content. Save content like articles, tweets, posts, videos and images across the web. Then organize the content in collections to share selectively.
  5. Photos for Class provides creative commons images that are safe to use for educational purposes.
  6. SurveyMonkey is a survey platform that teachers can use to assess the effect the lessons have on students and the depth of their understanding. A survey is an effective tool to collect students’ responses, to understand what they are interested in, and to get an idea of how they relate to the way lessons are taught.
  7. Teachers By Teachers is a site with over 3 million resources created by teachers. This online marketplace gives teachers the opportunity to sell their original educational material or to purchase material from other teachers. You’ll find lesson plans on subject ranging from teaching text features to guided reading.
  8. Prezi creates interactive presentations to capture students’ attention. Prezi caters for teachers who aren’t designers but desire great designs. The library is stocked with templates that are easily adjusted.
  9. Wordle creates word clouds in different shapes. Use these word images to complement language lessons by focusing on specific words.
  10. Quizlet creates flashcard study tools for students with the eight study modes provided. Learning activities, games and interactive study materials will help to engage students during lessons and when learning at home.
  11. Planboard is a free tool to help teachers in planning lessons, managing schedules and aligning curriculum sets. Create lesson templates for future use or use builtin lesson templates and add attachments, photos, and
  12. YouTube contains a vast variety of educational lessons, videos, songs, movies, and even cartoons teachers can incorporate into their lessons. Watching a short video on a subject is an entertaining way to re-enforce the lesson.
  13. TEDEd contains great learning materials teachers can use for creating lessons. Videos are organized by subject. With more than 300,000 lessons created and over 21 million questions answered TED-Ed is a resourceful tool for teachers and students.
  14. Creaza enables you to create videos, cartoons, mind maps and presentations to add a creative and playful element to the lessons.
  15. CommonLit is a nonprofit EdTech organization founded by former teachers. The award-winning reading and writing platform gives teachers free access to reading passages and text-dependent assessment questions that help analyze the student’s
  16. Diagnostics Questions is an assessment tool that reduces the teacher’s workload and provides valuable insight into the student’s understanding. Instead of homework, create a year’s assessments with three simple steps.
  17. Insert Learning transforms web pages into interactive lessons with the insertion of instructional content using videos, text, discussions, and questions.
  18. Wizer creates interactive worksheets online using a variety of question types. Visually appealing worksheets with the ability to add video, images, and audio can engage and captivate students to learn new skills and subjects.
  19. SpiderScribe is a mind mapping, and brainstorming tool teachers can use to create lesson plans, organize the curriculum or complement lessons. Teachers can assign assignments for students to complete.
  20. NewseumEd is a news museum for history, civics and media literacy. The site provides free interactive learning tools, lesson plans, activities, and thematic collections.
  21. Legend of Learning provides science games in support of science lessons for 3rd to 8th Over 1000 games grouped into 147 learning objectives. Each objective contains 8-10 games to drag-and-drop into playlists.
  22. Learn Around the World provide virtual field trips with guest speakers and collaborations.
  23. My Simple Show allows teachers to create explainer videos within minutes. Simply choose a storyline and create the script. My Simple Show creates the video with graphics and voice over.
  24. Ardusat teaches students hands-on science, coding, and use real-data to empower STEM curriculum. Each experiment can be completed during a class period.
  25. EdPuzzle makes videos the lesson by adding natural stopping points to trigger discussions in the classroom. Use the videos for self-paced learning by adding own voice recordings or questions to the videos.

Learning EdTech Tools

Here are 17 EdTech tools that help students with homework assignments, to re-enforce lessons taught and to help them understand the material.

  1. Matific, an award-winning resource that helps children understand math concepts by using ordinary objects. There are more than 1500 interactive activities learners can do to improve test results.
  2. Times Table Rock Stars is a learning platform for primary and secondary school students to learn and practice their times-tables daily. Each week focuses on a different times table. Animated theme and reward systems inspire kids to practice by themselves or complete homework assignments.
  3. Kahoot is a game-based learning platform with easy to create games or use an existing game. Games created around quizzes with multiple choice questions enforces lessons learned. It allows for competing against classmates and improving own scores.
  4. Quizizz is a multiplayer classroom gamification app with avatars, funny memes, and leaderboards. Teachers can create quizzes or use quizzes created by other teachers. Students work at their own pace and are automatically graded.
  5. Recap by asking the right questions to see if the students understood the lesson. Students provide video responses.
  6. FreeMediaGoo for a variety of images students can use in homework assignments and other projects.
  7. TimeToast creates timelines from the past into the future. Add stories to the timeline for school projects.
  8. Khan Academy is a free learning app for kids. Supplement classroom materials with the educational resources on subjects like science and engineering, math by grade, economics, and finance, and arts.
  9. Socrative is a fun classroom app with different learning activities. Students engage in these educational games on any device. Teachers can track and assess the student’s progress.
  10. Knewton is focused on each student’s needs. The content online is personalized and adapted for every student.
  11. Educreations enables teachers to create dynamic video lessons on iPad to share in Dropbox, Google Drive, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook or email. Students can access these video lessons at any time.
  12. FunBrain provides interactive games, videos, books, and printable materials for kids in grades Pre- to grade 8. These fun activities help kids improve their literacy skills, reading, problem-solving, and math.
  13. Wonder Workshop teaches children robotics and computer science. Dash and Cue robots inspire kids to code and solve problems. Dash the robot provides 24 activity cards with games and challenges.
  14. Tiggly for schools use interactive toys and iPad learning apps to bring physical play into digital apps. The tablet reacts to the toys’ silicon touch points like it would to fingertips. Three learning systems are available: Tiggly Words, Tiggly Shapes, and Tiggly Math.
  15. StudySync help students engage in literature discussions with a digital library that provides discussions, resources, and videos on books. The assignment tool creates assignments from selected text.
  16. Revision Buddies is a self-assessment learning tool for students. Thousands of questions with answers written by teachers to help students learn for exams.
  17. Black Bullion teaches financial education in a friendly manner. The platform teaches students how to manage their money including topics like savings, risk management, student loans, and credit.

Social Media EdTech Tools

Many social media type apps help with connecting and communications between students and teachers.  Here are eight tools to consider.

  1. Skype allows individual as well as group texting, phone calls, and group video calls. It is available on desktop, mobiles, and tablets.
  2. WhatsApp groups give the freedom of secure messaging with end-to-end encryption. Text or send video calls to the whole class.
  3. Pinterest boards make it easy to find lesson plans, projects, and other materials posted by teachers for personal use or to share with the classroom.
  4. EduBlogs is a WordPress platform that is free for educational blogging. Create a blog community by allowing the learners to blog and comment on published blog posts.
  5. Brainly is a community of students that help each other by answering questions posted by peers. There are millions of questions on the various subject already in the database too.
  6. Remind is a messaging app for teachers, students and parents to communicate easily. Send messages in real-time directly to any mobile phone. You can even schedule reminders ahead of time. Communicate through texting, photos, voice clips or PDFs. The majority of U.S. state schools communicate through Remind.
  7. Living Tree is a private 2-way social network messaging system between the classroom and home. Each school and each classroom has its private network.
  8. ClassDojo builds a classroom community where teachers can encourage students. Students can showcase their learning by creating portfolios with photos and videos. Teachers can share great classroom moments with parents.

Useful EdTech Tools

Although there are many similar tools, here are 17 tools to help organize and simplify a teacher’s life.

  1. Evernote is a note-taking app with additional features. Capture images, articles, web links and other materials in one place. Use notebooks and tags to differentiate and find content. Evernote Web is an easy way to select links and articles you want to read later for specific lesson planning ideas.
  2. Google Education offers a variety of EdTech resources that include email, videos, lesson plan search, collaborative apps, professional development, and grants.
  3. Dropbox stores data in one central place with easy sharing of specific content between teachers and students. It is a free service that syncs across all devices.
  4. Diigo annotates web pages and pdf If you enjoy highlighting, bookmarking and adding sticky notes to the reading material, then Diigo is a helpful tool. Diigo gives you the same paper-based experience online.
  5. Jing simplifies capturing and saving screenshots of images on your computer screen. The tool allows you to select only the section you want to capture. It is also possible to capture 5-minute videos and to edit before sharing.
  6. LiveBinders organizes resources in an online ring binder. Create and share your textbooks, packages for parents to help their children learn or handbooks and guides for teachers.
  7. Canva is a drag-and-drop designing software for various graphic designs like book covers, Facebook ads, images for blog posts and business cards.
  8. AudioBoom – Create lesson podcasts or other recordings and share it with students, parents or peers.
  9. Edmodo reduces paperwork with its intuitive digital classroom features. Teach, assign homework, and involve parents to reinforce what was taught in class. Integrate with Google Apps for Education and Microsoft OneNote and Microsoft Office to simplify your life.
  10. Noisli helps students focus and improves productivity by creating white noise. It helps learners who need noise concentrate without disturbing students who prefer silence.
  11. Airhead is an open cloud desktop that enables teachers to use the apps they prefer. The AirBase library contains resources and apps to select from. Save time with the automatically log in feature to all the different apps.
  12. AutoDraw is a fast drawing app for those who can’t draw. The AI auto-completes drawings you start. Inspire students or keep the fast workers busy with this doodling tool. Add colors and text to the drawing.
  13. PicMonkey is a photo editor tool used for photo editing, graphic design and collage making.
  14. DonorsChoose is a classroom funding site where teachers can request needed materials for their students.
  15. Infogram is a free site to create infographics and interactive online charts. Use infographics to teach content visually.
  16. ZipGrade is a grading tool for smartphones and tablets. The free downloadable answer sheets enable teachers to grade and asses students quickly with instant feedback.
  17. Corkboard is an online sticky notes tool. Organize and share postings via social media. Use corkboard in the classroom for assignments, or as a reading list. When a child has read a book, they can start a discussion about the book.

Although this isn’t a comprehensive list, we trust the list was helpful. What EdTech tools do you use that we didn’t mention?

Additional Sources:

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/7-edtech-tools-use-still-classroom/

http://www.gettingsmart.com/2012/08/50-essential-edtech-tools-by-category/

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/6-tech-tools-2018/

https://elearningindustry.com/321-free-tools-for-teachers-free-educational-technology

https://tutorful.co.uk/blog/the-82-hottest-edtech-tools-of-2017-according-to-education-experts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.