There’s nothing better than a great app or website that makes my life as a teacher easier! Below are three apps that I think teachers will love!
1. Bloomz
One of the most important things as a classroom teacher, especially on the elementary level, is parent communication. I can remember my first few years of teaching using carbon paper notepads to write notes home to parents, so that I could have a copy for my records. Technology has made it so much easier to communicate with parents. Currently, teachers use Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, Remind, Smores flyers, SignUp Genius and many other tools to communicate with parents and share the events of their classrooms. A new app Bloomz will make parent-teacher communication easier than it’s every been.
Although I haven’t used it in real life, Bloomz has the potential to be my FAVORITE and I plan to share it with every teacher I know!
With Blooms you can:
- Share photos safely
- Instant message and email parents
- Post class updates and reminders
- Create sign-ups for events and parent-teacher conferences
I encourage every teacher to head over to Bloomz and check it out. If you want to know more, Check out the below video to learn a little more!
2. EPIC!
The name says it all – this app is EPIC! It is FREE for teachers and available in both the Apple App Store and Google Play.
EPIC! has a wide range of fiction and nonfiction books. It includes many well-known titles, such as Scaredy Squirrel, Big Nate, The Berenstain Bears, and so many more! Books are organized by category, so students can find the perfect book for them based on the types of books they enjoy. There’s even a summer reading challenge, that allows students to earn badges and a certificate based on the books they read this summer!
You can never have too many books in your classroom and Epic! instantly enhances your classroom library giving your students access to even more books! I hope you’ll all check it out and use EPIC! in your classrooms next year!
3. Plickers
I don’t even know where to begin with Plickers… Plickers can be used in small group or with the whole class and offer a quick, and super easy way to gather data about students’ mastery of concepts.
So what is a plicker? A Plicker is basically a QR code, which allows students to respond to multiple choice or true/false questions. The student turns their QR code in a certain direction to indicate their choice and then the teacher can scan the room with a phone or tablet to gather student responses.
Check out the below video to learn more!
These are just a few tech tools that I’m excited to use next school year! What tools would you add to this list as MUST use??
Feature image courtesy of Flickr, Kwintin.