With digital lessons delivery rising in popularity, there is a huge demand for engaging and effective virtual tools to use in lessons. Educational technology tools can also be used in the physical classroom to add variety to lessons and to make learning a topic a fun and creative process for students.
Discover our top picks of ed tech tools to help with your teaching duties and to introduce into your lessons.
Anchor
Podcasts are all the rage and creating your own can be a great way of learning about, researching and sharing a topic you are studying. Anchor is a free podcast creation tool for beginners and is perfect for school-aged students to get creative and engage with a subject.
Book Creator
Allowing students to create something they can be proud of is a great way to encourage interest in a topic and Book Creator allows learners of all ages to create, well, a book! On the platform, students demonstrate their understanding and unleash their creative side by putting together multimodal stories or reports, complete with a front cover.
Edpuzzle
Many students are visual learners who can learn from educational videos. However, it is hard to always know how much students are actually taking away from a video. Edpuzzle turns videos into dynamic lessons by allowing you to add questions for students to answer throughout the clip. Choose from multiple choice and written answer questions to check your students’ learning progress.
Edmodo
All digital classroom tools can be found in one place on Edmodo. Send messages to your students and share class materials, and see students’ grades and progress at a glance.
Equity Maps
Equity Maps provides a place for students and teachers to engage in discussion where every voice is heard. The virtual platform features ‘discussion maps’, which displays data on class discussions such as who has spoken, how long has each person spoken for, the gender divide of speaking time and more.
Flipgrid
Flipgrid supports social learning in your classroom. As a video discussion app, it provides a safe, accessible space to discuss and engage with meaningful topics. Students connect by being added to an online room and then gaining access to a page for each topic you wish for the class to discuss. Once in the page, students can add comments on video content and share their own.
Floop
We all aim for feedback on students’ work to be provided quickly whilst still being constructive. With Floop, you can take a photo of students’ work and then drag and drop comments anywhere on their page. There is an option that prevents students from seeing their assignment grade unless they have looked at the comments and they can also reply to feedback on the easily-accessible platform.
Gimkit
Virtual class quizzes are fun but not all students perform well under pressure. Gimkit is a quiz tool students access on their own device which allows them to answer set multiple choice questions at their own pace. To ensure they are really learning the material, questions are shown to learners multiple times until they master them.
Google Arts & Culture
During the pandemic when cultural visitor sites were closed to the public, museums around the world set up virtual tours of their exhibitions. Now that sites are reopened, these virtual tours are still an exciting opportunity to ‘visit’ truly educational cultural epicentres.
GooseChase
Create a scavenger hunt in your classroom or around the whole school with GooseChase! Each GooseChase game contains a series of missions you set and when participants complete them successfully, they earn points. Don’t worry if you are not feeling very inventive because there are hundreds of preset missions you can use in your game!
Kahoot
With 50 million monthly users, Kahoot! is hugely popular educational tool used by teachers worldwide. On the interactive platform, students can engage with multiple-choice quizzes where all answers are displayed together instantly. Students are challenged to answer questions on subjects they have been learning and their competitive natures are brought out in fun, class-wide activities.
Minecraft: Education Edition
The global phenomenon has a version aimed at enriching students’ education! Creativity, collaboration and problem-solving is encouraged in this learning platform that is sure to get your students excited. Available on computers and as a tablet app, Minecraft: Education Edition is free with Office 365 Education accounts.
NearPod
What if your lesson presentation were more interactive? NearPod allows you to build multimedia into slides, such as videos, games and even assessment questions. When students access a presentation, you will receive data on their learning progress.
Pear Deck
Designed for school teachers, Pear Deck is a tool which allows for greater control over Google Slides, making for more fun and engaging lesson presentations. Choose from templates and personalise them to your lessons’ needs or build an interactive presentation from scratch!
Prodigy
Prodigy is a mathematics tool for students of all ages. Through fun games and quests, learners work their way through maths learning at their level whilst you track their progress.
Quizizz
Online quiz tools are all the rage in the classroom and Quizizz is a great, easy-to-use option. Use pre-built quizzes or make your own to help students brush up on their knowledge in a fun way.
Skew the Script
Skew the Script is a platform providing free mathematics curriculums that bring the subject into the real world. Lessons are designed to boost learners’ statistics, numeracy and critical thinking skills whilst showing them the modern relevance of maths.
SpiderScribe
SpiderScribe is perfect for visual learners. Students can collaborate on online mind maps containing their notes, files, ideas, calendar events and more, or build a private map to organise and brainstorm their thoughts.
Storybird
Grow your students’ writing skills with Storybird. On the online community for literacy learners and their teachers, users can share their own original writing based on prompts provided by Songbird, as well as access lessons, video tutorials and quizzes. There are also guides for teachers to help them build engaging literacy curriculums.
TED Ed
From the organisation that brought us the world-famous TED Conferences comes Ted-Ed. Ted-Ed shares educational talks aimed at supporting young people’s learning. Its videos (and there is bound to be one related to whatever topic you are teaching) are perfect to build into your lessons.
Tynker
Every student must learn coding these days and Tynker helps them enjoy picking up this necessary skill. Interactive story-based learning trains students in languages such as Python and JavaScript.
YouTube
Last but not least, the most famous ed tech tool of all. With its 800 million videos, YouTube is a classic go-to for visual educational resources. Someone out there will have made a video on the exact topic you are teaching and there are so many education-focused channels to help your students engage with the curriculum.
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