Technology is important in the classroom. Students, parents and educators all expect software to be used to help kids learn faster and more in-depth. But the application landscape changes so quickly, it can be hard to stay on top of what programs you should be using.
We’ve saved you time and compiled a list of the best apps for teachers in physical, hybrid learning, or digital classrooms. These apps are easy to use, save time, and some are more like an assistant than digital tools.
This list of great apps for teachers has excellent free versions; the in-app purchases are not expensive and offer significant additional features. We’ve included educational game apps for interactive learning, popular communication tools for parent-teacher communication, classroom management, and organization apps as paperwork alternatives.
Educational Game Apps
Kahoot! For Interactive Lessons
Create a Kahoot trivia quiz, host and play a learning game, or assign a student-paced Kahoots with the basic free version. Teachers can use the 100 million ready-to-play online content or create their own games. Games include timed games or self-paced games students can play as homework assignments.
Kahoot offers excellent versatility for K-12 teachers to create the perfect gaming interactive lessons for their students. In addition, it’s available for educational institutions as a school app for all the classrooms.
At $3 per month, a teacher can create interactive lessons with up to 100 players in class or for an online classroom with Kahoot! Pro and the Kahoot! Premium offers customization features.
Prodigy For English And Math Games
More than 3 million teachers use Prodigy, a research-based digital learning app, for student engagement and to boost learning with two innovative game worlds—English and math. Former English and math teachers help create the content broken down into bite-sized skills students can handle.
These fun games create an engaging learning experience teaching elementary school students how to apply the principles.
Prodigy is free, and the optional premium membership with additional tools and in-game features starts at $4.99 per month. For example, with the Prodigy Test Prep tool, teachers can review student data to know what they’ve mastered and what students are struggling with to plan future lessons.
Communication Apps
Remind For Texting Parents
Communication with parents is essential, and the Remind app makes parents-teachers communication easy. With simple text communication, teachers can keep parents up to date with lessons or text the class about new projects, homework assignments, or test results. One-on-one conversations with an individual student and family members are private.
The easy-to-use parental engagement app is free; everyone can receive messages and respond without the internet or need a fancy smartphone. Mobile notifications ensure parents don’t miss news from the teacher. With two-way translations in more than 90 languages, family members can communicate in their preferred language.
ClassDojo For Classroom Communities
With the popular communication tool, ClassDojo, students have a voice where they can show off their work. School students and teachers engage parents by sharing special classroom moments with videos and photos. Parents stay in the loop, and teachers can make class announcements or update parents.
ClassDojo is free. However, ClassDojo Plus is only $4.99 per month with additional features, including progress reports, family accounts, school announcements, and messaging fellow teachers. In addition, with the ClassDojo Toolkit, teachers can create random student groups, turn on background music, and direct classroom activities.
Seesaw Shares Student Progress
Used in over 200,000 classrooms, Seesaw Class gives parents insight into their child’s progress and education. Teachers send updates, announcements, videos, and photos to individual family members or the entire class.
Privacy and safety ensure parents and other family members can only access their kids’ work. The free version features message translations into 100+ languages, making communicating easier for all family members but limiting activities to 100.
The Seesaw for schools and districts premium version features include tracking student progress in specific areas, schoolwide messaging, lessons library, schedule activities, and LMS integration.
Classroom Management Apps
Additio To Manage Student Grades
Additio integrates with Google Classroom, Moodle, and Microsoft teams for convenient linking resources and importing grades and assignments. Featuring a grade book, attendance record, lesson planner, and reports with statistics, Additio Plus is one of the best classroom apps for teachers that saves time—a valuable commodity for all teachers.
The digital grade book app allows teachers to organize their students in the class, randomly choose students, use calculated formulas, and upload class materials for assessments.
More than 500,000 teachers utilize Additio with its 150+ features. Available on Android & Apple iOs, teachers can work anywhere offline.
Edulastic To Asses And Reinforce
Edulastic provides classroom assessments that help teachers quickly identify learning gaps. Based on the student’s assessment, a teacher can give differentiated assignments to challenge critical thinking and reinforce or remediate each student at their level.
The online tool measures progress, and classroom formatives, state test practice, and secure testing help keep students on track.
Ready-to-use digital content includes 10,000 free assessments, more than 80,000 standards-aligned questions, a virtual lesson library, links, and articles.
Apple Classroom For Behavior Management
Apple Classroom is for iOS and Mac users and is one of the best digital tools for student monitoring—ideal for online learning and productivity in the classroom. Teachers can monitor what students are doing on their Apple phones and tablets.
The app can automatically form student groups based on the apps students are using. Teachers can also create project groups, focus on one student’s screen, or have an overview of the entire class.
Share a class folder with all the students and make a student proud by showing their work on the classroom Apple TV. The ability to lock screens allows the teacher to refocus the class or pause their work for class discussions.
Explain Everything For Interactive Lessons
Explain Everything is one of the best apps for teachers that changes a blank canvas into an amazing multimedia presentation. The digital whiteboard is ideal for in-class, hybrid, and online classrooms integrating with most LMS and integrated teaching services.
Unlike the free plan, the Teacher plan, at $34,99 per year, has unlimited projects, slides, and custom templates. Both plans can access the template and clipart libraries, has external cloud storage integration, and allows document scanning.
Organization Apps
Dropbox For File Sharing
With 2Gb of free storage in the cloud, filesharing with Dropbox is convenient. Teachers access their stored documents, printables, and images with smartphones and tables from anywhere.
It’s a convenient way to share documents with parents, students, and other teachers.
Dropbox has a premium plan of $9.99 per month for delivering large files up to 2Gb with no device limits.
Evernote The Sticky Notes Alternative
Evernote is an excellent note-taking app for teachers, and its extra features help create lesson plans. With the free version, teachers can clip web pages and articles into categories, add tags, and make notes about them.
It is one of the best teacher apps for note-taking and collaboration, and the free version is excellent.
However, if you upload more than 60Mb, want to work offline, add due dates, reminders, and sync to unlimited devices, then it’s time to upgrade. Premium and business packages start at $9.99; with the additional features, teachers will save time and effort.
Fun Quiz Apps
Quizizz For Gamified Quizzes
Quizizz helps teachers create quizzes that promote a gamified experience for students. With millions of ready-to-use teacher-created questions, teachers can customize quizzes for their classes.
Each student sees the questions on their device, which is ideal for hybrid learning classrooms. In addition, homework mode is a great way to involve the family; students complete quizzes at their pace.
Live games spark healthy competition in a physical or remote learning classroom. Students compete against themselves and can retake tests. With instant grading, teachers can immediately see who gave the correct answers. Incorrect answers help teachers notice trends and knowledge gaps they should address in future lessons.
Quizizz also works through Google Classroom.
Socrative Teacher For Instant Feedback Quizzes
Socrative is a fun, engaging classroom management app that gives teachers instant feedback with interactive questions during lessons. Personalized activities, quizzes, and polls with real-time grading. Teachers can adjust their lessons based on their students’ needs with immediate assessment results.
The fun quizzes ensure lively participation and interaction from students during a lesson. Free for students, Socrative integrates with all phones and tablets.
Socrative Pro offers unlimited quiz creations and multiple rooms and activities at $8.99 per year.
Classroom Conversation Apps
Flip For Classroom Video Discussions
Flip, previously Flipgrid, is now part of Microsoft. It is free and the perfect digital tool for lively classroom discussions online or between classrooms.
Educators create message boards (or grids) to facilitate video discussions on one or more topics; they can upload their Google classroom roster or create a new group and invite students.
Students find Flip easy and fun to use. They respond to the topic or teacher’s questions with text, images, Giphy, emojis, videos, or attachments. Discussion responses appear in a tiled display within the topic grid.
Flip is versatile; students working on school projects or studying together can share their ideas and start a discussion within a grid.
Zoom For Breakout Discussions
Most teachers are familiar with Zoom’s communication platform for flexible learning and communication environments. But how many use the breakout rooms as a classroom feature for lively discussions and student engagement in smaller groups?
The teacher can automatically or pre-assign students to specific breakout rooms, broadcast a message to students, view activities in breakout rooms, or enter at any time or switch between breakout rooms.
Zoom is free for up to 100 attendees with a 40-minute limit.
Screencasting Apps
Camtasia For Professional Looking Videos
Camtasia is a screen recorder and video editor for Windows and Mac users—ideal for video lessons and instructional videos. The interactivity and quizzing feature encourages students to participate and helps teachers measure what students learn.
Easy to start, teachers can keep it simple by recording what is on the computer screen and adding a few effects. Then, they can screencast websites, presentations, video calls, web pages, or software.
Features like callouts, transitions, captions, and animations make excellent professional-looking videos. Without any video experience, teachers can produce high-quality videos and webinar recordings using the video templates.
The drag-and-drop editor makes editing straightforward. In addition, teachers can save most used tools and custom styles as favorites for instant access.
At a $20 per year or $30 lifetime license, Camtasia is a worthwhile investment.
Snagit For Screencasting Lessons And Assignments
The easy-to-use Snagit with classroom-ready templates will save teachers time and endless explanations. Instantly save screenshots or use the templates to create a visual guide for students. It is a great app for teachers to reply with quick answers, collaborate, share, and create step-by-step instructions.
Compatible with Microsoft products, Google Drive, TechSmith software like Camtasia, Box, Dropbox, Slack, and TechSmith software like Camtasia, teachers can share videos and screenshots with students.
Snagit offers a free version and a lifetime license at $72,44. You can also purchase a bundle license for Camtasia and Snagit.
Subject Related And Curriculum Apps
Khan Academy To Learn Anything
Khan Academy is free for students and teachers. The library content, created by experts, covers a range of subject lessons from Kindergarten to high school—ready to use.
So whether you are a middle school teacher teaching historical figures, a high school biology teacher, or an elementary teacher introducing math, Khan Academy is the go-to app for all.
The available tools help teachers identify knowledge gaps and personalize the learning experience for each student. As a result, students learn and practice at their pace and move to the next level when they’ve mastered skills.
Wolfram Alpha For STEM Subjects
Wolfram Alpha has tons of STEM-related resources, including a problem generator. Students can practice online math problems; built-in hints and step-by-step solutions are excellent feedback for incorrect answers.
The free version is excellent, but upgrading to Wolfram Alpha Pro for $5 per month unlocks more features that help teachers create unique, engaging content.
Teachers can create homework assignments, assemble amazing lessons, present real-world problems with up-to-date data, check student answers, and generate stunning visuals.
Photomath For Math Homework
Photomath is an excellent math app to help students master arithmetic to calculus homework assignments. In addition, the app offers step-by-step explanations for students to work through at home.
It’s like having their personal math tutor reinforcing math concepts learning in the classroom.
With Photomath Plus, students can do even more. Animated tutorials visualize the steps helping students to remember to process. In addition, the Plus version unlocks textbook tutoring, a math dictionary, and additional content.
Have you used any of these great apps for teachers, and which would you recommend?