Teachers need good tools to teach their students. While some tools are essential, these online tools can help teachers improve their teaching skills. With the top-online tools for teachers, educators will never be at loss for educational activities.
Teacher toolboxes in the modern teaching environment are many and diverse. Most include trusted standbys like Evernote, Google tools, Edmodo, Wikispaces, and others. Of course, everybody has their own favourite sites and tools, but the fact remains teacher toolboxes need terrific education tools. If you’re looking for something different, though, you might be interested in what’s below.
We’re always scouring the Web looking for new ideas to share and new education tools for teaching and learning are cropping up all the time. Sometimes, it’s hard to keep track, so that’s why many of the tools here in the following list are suggestions provided by you. For this we thank you, and our community thanks you.
Here we have 25 different education tools to add to teacher toolboxes that we haven’t explored before. Discover the applications they could have in your own practices. In addition, many of them are also shareable with students. You can all learn about them as you proceed with your learning adventures. As always, we welcome your suggestions as well.
25 Great Education Tools for Teacher Toolboxes
- Future Focused Learning Network—Our own global online professional learning network! Inspiring masterclasses, rich resources and the positive support you need to improve instruction and enhance outcomes.
- A Web Whiteboard—The perfect tool for class brainstorming sessions. This is an online whiteboard app for computer, tablet, or smartphone.
- Articulate—A great tool for creating online learning courses. 19 of 20 top-ranked universities currently employ this platform.
- Artsy—This is a beautiful resource for art collection and education. Lots of tools make it an ideal resource for art classes.
- Coursera—What do you want to learn? Whatever it is, it’s likely on Coursera. They’ve got over 16 million learners taking over 1500 courses right now.
- Marshmallow Coding—A fun unique way for younger students to learn the power of code.
- Unicheck—This is one of the most powerful plagiarism checkers on the Web today. Unplag is a safe secure tool with lots of educator features.
- Edpuzzle—A big booster for flipped learning teachers. Customize regular videos with engaging interactive learning tools. You can even track students’ actions and progress with this tool.
- EdX—Another bank of online courses for personalized learning. This tool features content from many top universities around the world.
- Focus Booster—This is a time tracking and productivity app. It works off the Pomodoro technique. It features instant timesheet recording and visual progress graphs.
- Formative—This is an amazing formative assessment app. Create an assignment and get live results from students. Present them with real-time feedback in an instant, too.
- Homeroom Mom—A unique online support community. They share tips and tools for working with parents and teachers. They’ve also got ideas for all sorts of class projects.
- Lightsail—An e-reading program that helps teachers support independent reading in students. You can monitor progress and give assessment and feedback in real time.
- Notability—Note-taking was never this much fun. It’s a feature-rich tool available for Mac devices. Write, sketch, and interact with your notes.
- PearDeck—A wonderful interactive presentation tool. Engage your whole class with presentations you control from your computer. Students respond to your built-in questions using a wide range of tools.
- Plickers—This is a simple tool that lets teachers collect real-time formative assessment data. This happens without the need for student devices. It’s for everything from quick checks to measuring deep understanding.
- Pocket—A bookmarking tool for teachers on the go. Save articles, videos, images, and lots more for later viewing. You can also save from Twitter, Flipboard, Pulse and Zite.
- Rescue Time—This is a non-intrusive time tracker program. It shows you how much time you spend on your websites and apps. You get detailed reports of where your time is going online.
- Schoology—A powerful K–12 and higher ed learning management system. Create content, design lessons, and assess understanding with this tool.
- Socrative—Socrative lets you to engage and assess your students as learning happens. There are tools for real-time quizzing, generating results, and visualizing progress.
- Teaching Channel—This is a video resource for professional development. It covers the core subjects and all grades. There are also 15 professional development topics to explore here.
- TEDEd—TED’s tradition of excellence continues here with this teaching resource. Watch videos, explore lessons, and view learning series compilations of all kinds.
- TurnItIn—This is an interactive rubric for analyzing the quality of Internet sources students use in writing. Sites are evaluated based on authority, educational value, intent, originality, and quality.
- VideoScribe—This tool lets you create whiteboard-style animations—no design or technical experience needed. You can add images, text, music and voiceover to your animations.
- Wolfram Alpha—Whatever you want to calculate or research, this electronic genius can do it. Enter a topic or choose from a wide range of knowledge fields. Go Pro if you want even better results.
Video Screen Sharing in Real-Time & Sharing Videos
1. Zoom

Zoom is a platform that was originally designed for business meetings online and for companies to have an online space for employees. Zoom though has developed into an excellent tool for use as a virtual classroom and their software is now used by:
- Individual teachers (my yoga teacher in the UK is even using it now to provide online yoga lessons)
- Universities and schools to create large virtual classrooms for hundreds of students
- Businesses to provide staff and employees live online training as eLearning modules or real-time online classes and tuition.
Conclusion: Great for teaching online for both individual freelance trainers, and for both small and large companies. One of the best tools on the market for providing online training.
2. Skype Video

a) For Freelance Trainers and Individuals Teaching Online
Skype video has traditionally been very popular for video calls to family and friends but Skype is also increasingly being used by businesses these days and it is an excellent option if you are looking to provide both teaching and training online. Skype also, by the way, integrates nicely with Microsoft teams (see below).
As an individual offering corporate training online (i.e. if you are self-employed), you can use the personal version of Skype and this is an incredibly easy and cheap way to offer online classes and lessons 1-to-1. It’s also a great tool for researchers such as those doing Skype interviews for Masters and PhD research.

On Skype, you can easily share your screen with the people or person you are chatting with by clicking the overlapping boxes at the bottom of the interface. You will see these boxes when you are in a video call with someone (see image above).
b) For Company Training Online (and Co-working Space Online)
Skype is also excellent for Groups!
In addition to being an excellent option for team meetings and online co-working space, you can use Skype Groups for teaching and training employees and staff from afar.

Wherever in the world you physically are, you can provide external or in-house training online, for up to 50 people at a time.
Conclusion: Brilliant for offering 1-to-1 teaching and training online especially for teaching languages and for many one-to-one topics. Also a very good option for busineeses of any size.
3. MS Teams

If you are a fan of Microsoft and already use their software such as Microsoft 365, then you will very likely love their online collaboration software.
I’ve used Microsoft Teams and it is always easy even for those people not used to working and collaborating online. I prefer ‘Zoom’ for teaching online in all honesty but for team meetings and office chats, this is as good as any option (although not the cheapest).
Conclusion: Particularly good for larger companies and very easy to use for online teachers and trainers.
4. Google Hangouts (for Teachers)
Google Hangouts is another video conferencing service that is also great for those of you looking to provide live classes and lessons online. With hangouts you can:
- Share screens and files
- Chat
- Use a shares hangout space to collaborate
You will need to have a Google account, so if you already use Gmail you will already have a Google account that you can use for Google Hangouts. The short intro video below gives you a flavor of hangouts and how you can use it as an online trainer or teacher.https://www.youtube.com/embed/QwQGPr78vxQ?feature=oembed
Conclusion: Whilst Zoom is my favourite, Google Hangouts is more than sufficient and really quite easy to use for teaching online.
Paid Tools for Providing Training Online
5. Teachable

Teachable is one of the world’s leaders and the biggest platform worldwide for placing your courses online as a trainer, for users to study in their own time and at their own pace.
Teachable also provides a very clean and stylish online school for you. Furthermore, it is very user-friendly and offers very affordable plans that accommodate all trainers and teachers looking to add their courses online.
On Teachable, you:
- Create your school
- Add your content by uploading videos, text, images or whatever content you want to add and include in your lessons
- You set the pricing of your courses and design your sales page/s (inside teachable)
Here at Symonds Training, we ourselves use Teachable for our ‘Train the Trainer Online Course’ and for our sister site’s Blogging for Beginners online course.

Conclusion: Teachable is the best option if you are looking to add your own online course as a trainer and so that your users can individually study your course online in their own time from anywhere.
6. Thinkific

Thinkific is similar to Teachable.com in what it does in that they are both platforms on which you, as a freelance trainer or teacher, can add your courses and sell them.
Having tried both Thinkific and Teachable though, I found Teachable far easier to use and to do everything technically and I love the classroom design that students see when they are logged into Teachable.
You might though find Thinkific easier so it can be worth trying out a demo version.
Conclusion: If you are looking for a one-to-one platform for putting your online courses live for people to do in their own time, worth trying out.
Free and Paid Tools & Services for Online Teachers and Trainers
7. We Transfer

WeTransfer is something I suspect you might have already used given it is one of the best tools on the market for transferring large files securely across the Internet.
There are both free and paid versions with the free version allowing transfers of up to 2 GB and the Pro-package lets you send files up to 20 GB.
So, if you want to send large files to team members or to students (such as to send them the digital handbook), this is a great way to avoid clogging up your email box, if you have lots of large files to send and receive.
Conclusion: If you are transferring large files online for any reason, WeTransfer is arguably the best service online and you can use the free version!
8. Socrative

Socrative is a handy site given that they enable you to easily and quickly create your own interactive quizzes that you can share on your digital classroom.
You can also use Socrative if you wish to create digital classrooms (up to 20 classrooms) with up to 50 students in each class.
Conclusion: I have not used the classrooms feature but this is certainly a good option for making quizzes for your digital classes.
9. GoConqr

Goconqr – whether you are a student, teacher or freelance trainer, GoConqr is one of my favorite sites for easily and quickly creating classy looking:
- Mindmaps
- Quizzes
- Flashcards
- Flowcharts
- and for creating study planners and a course builder

Conclusion: On GoConqr, I often use their Flashcard and quiz feature and find them super easy to use.
10. YouTube

You are most likely familiar with YouTube and have at one time or another watched a video or two on this platform.
We have recently just created our own YouTube Channel (would be incredibly grateful if you subscribed) and this is a great way to reach out to potential students if you are a freelance trainer offering training and your own classes and lessons online.
Conclusion: As a freelance trainer or online teacher, YouTube can be a wonderful resource for building a following and building interest in yourself as a brand, as the teacher trainer. And it’s free. You can also potentially make money from the ads that show if you build enough followers.
11.Grammarly

If you haven’t already been using Grammarly, where have you been 🙂
Grammarly is a plugin you can attach to your browser or to MS Word to get it to automatically check your grammar. Hey – we all make mistakes when writing!
You can set the language i.e. American English or British English and Grammarly will highlight any badly constructed sentences or spelling errors.
Conclusion: If you do nothing else on this page, at least install Grammarly on your Google Chrome browser if you use Google Chrome. Grammarly is FREE and brilliant!
12. ConvertKit Mailing List

As someone teaching online, it is essential that you have direct contact with your students and prospective students. Remember MySpace or Friends Reunited? These sites do often go out of business and, with them, you lose all of your followers.
There is a simple solution though! You need a mail list from day 1 of your business being online and this is super-important!
Indeed, the key to being able to keep people informed of your new courses and to build up a rapport to build trust with potential students is to have a digital mail list.
You need, in other words, to be able to market your courses online to find students!
This means that you have people sign up to your mail list and the easiest way to do this is to offer a freebie (an incentive) such as we do on this site with our freelance trainers FREE 7-Day email course.
ConvertKit is arguably the best mailing list software online and it is one of the most popular with online business owners, especially with online teachers and online trainers.
Conclusion: The best mail list software available and it is essential to build your mail list from the very start to ensure you have a direct way to always target your existing and potential students.
12. Fotor (Drag and Drop Design)

Fotor is an incredibly easy to use design package that you do NOT NEED any design skills to use.
As an online teacher, you will no doubt need to design graphics for your PPT PowerPoint slides, or for your online classroom, as well as for all other documents you will use as a teacher.
With Fotor, you can literally drag and drop graphics and images that are supplied on Fotor, into pre-made templates. So easy.
Conclusion: Fotor is so easy to use given that, as mentioned, you do NOT need to be a designer. Brilliant tool!
13. Canva (for Educators)

On a par with Fotor and very similar, is Canva. For online educators you have two choices:
- Canva for Education (free service) such as if you are an offline school looking to use online resources for creating teaching materials.
- Standard Canva – such as if you are an individual, ie. freelance trainer or online teacher, who needs to create a professional design but without you having any design skills. Drag, drop and download!
Conclusion: Use either Canva or Fotor and you can design images, graphics for your lesson plans in minutes. Two amazing tools with FREE and a very inexpensive paid version for advanced features.
14. 5 Minute Lesson Plan

Some of the very best online teaching tools for providing eLearning are the simplest of all.
The 5-minute lesson plan drives you to saving lesson planning time and towards, as the title suggests, being able to effortlessly create a quality lesson plan in 5 minutes. And it works!
Conclusion: If you are a teacher or corporate trainer who needs to make lesson plans, DO try this tool!
15. Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere makes creating and generating poll results super-easy. This software integrates with:
- Powerpoint
- Google slides
- Keynote
Conclusion: If you want to make both offline real-life classes and online training classes and sessions more interactive and more fun, why not create a poll? If you do, it doesn’t get much easier than by using ‘Poll Everywhere’.
16. Quizlet (for Teachers)

Quizlet is al alternative tool for you to ‘Poll Everywhere’ for creating interactive games and activities.
You can use Quizlet for offline real-life classroom teaching or for your digital classroom lessons. Quizlet lets you create a game based on images, text, and audio that you add to this app.https://www.youtube.com/embed/7oJk0IBynoU?feature=oembed
Conclusion: I recommend to certainly give ‘Quizlet’ a trial to add more activitiy into your training days, worlkshops and classes. Very easy to use!
17. Padlet
Padlet is a tool that I absolutely love and cannot recommend highly enough.
This is a digital pinboard that your students can use and this is a great tool for making your training sessions or classroom teaching more fun, interactive, and interesting.https://www.youtube.com/embed/U3P5QySmLeU?feature=oembed
Conclusion: Using Padlet is fun and I find that it really makes corporate training sessions that i run more interesting. It’s great even for corporate training games and activities and games.
Extra Tools for Teaching Online
18. New Portal: Meetup.com Online Groups
Great for Freelance trainers looking to teach online.
Meetup.com has traditionally been a site that is used worldwide for organizing events, workshops and get-togethers. They in fact have over 35 million users!
Meetup has now also introduced an Online Groups service and this means that you can now also organize events online through their system, using video-conferencing to actually offer classes to teach online via meetup.comhttps://www.youtube.com/embed/FwKOXWpgcpU?feature=oembed
Meetup.com does it all as you might have read in our post on meetup.com for freelance trainers. In other words, you can teach everything from yoga classes, to book reading clubs to wellness workshops and presentation skills workshops.
Whatever you can think of, someone organizes it somewhere in the world and meetup.com is one of the biggest portals worldwide for offering events and then building the attendees list and taking payments.
19. Symonds Training PowerPoint PPT Training Course Materials

The problem
- Creating training course materials is very time-consuming!
- Finding good activities to include in the training to make the training and teaching enjoyable is not easy.
- You might not have the experience or interest in designing PPT PowerPoint slides
- And you might not be highly experienced in pedagogy (learning styles)
You have to research the topic area in-depth and even if you are already familiar with the topic, creating a training program around it is not easy.
The solution – Buying Digital Training Course Materials
Buying pre-designed packages that are designed by professional researchers and who have expertise in these fields and who have pedagogy and teaching experience at the highest level.
These digital training course materials include:
- PPT Powerpoint slides
- Digital teacher’s notes and handbook
- Students’ handbook (digital copy)
- eCertificate that can be customized and printed
Remote Teaching Tools
Familiarizing yourself with how the tool or platform that you use works, is as important as selecting the correct tool.
Explore each tool and learn ways to maximize its utility to create a better teaching experience. Your students will depend on you to instruct them on how to use the platform themselves.
There’s a range of remote teaching software available out there, and from them, we have chosen the best ones and categorized them based on their primary purpose.
Online Communication Tools
Effective communication is the key to successful teaching and learning, whether in a physical classroom or a virtual classroom. However, maintaining online communication with not one, but over twenty students is undoubtedly challenging.
Communication platforms help overcome it; they enable communication with larger groups, with video conferencing, instant messaging, audio calls, virtual rooms, and more, with any device and from anywhere.
Some of the tools in demand are,
For a better teaching experience with these tools,
- Create an agenda or a plan for each online class and share it prior to the lesson
- Clearly explain the online etiquette students should follow during the class and what is expected of them prior to or at the beginning of the lesson
- Have all microphones, except for the person who is speaking, muted. This helps cancel out the distracting noises and retain the focus of the students. Anyone who needs to speak can make a gesture to catch the attention of the speaker without interrupting them.
- When delivering a presentation or sharing an image, document or file, give some time for students to take down notes, to view or go through them.
Online Whiteboards
Online whiteboards or digital whiteboards help emulate the classroom whiteboard/ blackboard experience with the students. Most of these tools offer an infinite canvas with shape libraries for creating different types of diagrams, charts, graphs, and other visualization purposes (i.e. creating posters, graphic organizers, etc.).
Creately is widely used by educators for a variety of purposes:

- As an online whiteboard where teachers and students can collaborate on the same canvas as they visualize ideas, concepts, etc. Moreover, students and teachers can connect via in-app video conferencing and track changes each other makes with real-time mouse tracking and change previews.
- Create a variety of diagrams and visuals (i.e. dichotomous key diagrams, graphic organizers, lesson plans, etc.) needed for presentations, lessons, assignments, etc.
- To share documents with students and colleagues for their output and feedback (with in-line comments)
Work Planning Tools
Maintaining a work schedule is even more important when you are working from home; especially during stressful times, a solid routine can help maximize the use of your time. You can use time management and scheduling apps like Google Calendar and Calendly to streamline:
- Creating schedules to use in your online classes or for personal use
- Creating schedules of online classes and keep everyone notified of dates and times.
- Scheduling appointments with parents and students; avoid double-booking a slot
- Inviting parents, students or colleagues for online events (i.e. webinars)
- Creating lesson plans and sharing them with students, administrators, and colleagues.
Learn how to create a lesson plan using Google Calendar here.
Social Media Channels
Social media channels provide a great platform for teachers, students and parents to stay connected.
Channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, etc. allow the creation of exclusive communities or groups teachers can leverage on to
- Communicate and maintain presence after online class hours
- Share and store important information, presentations, and resources related to lessons
- Conduct Q&A sessions
- Encourage students to maintain communication among themselves and engage with each other while studying or doing homework
- Conduct live events such as webinars (with Facebook or Instagram Live)
Document Management Tools
From test papers to lesson plans, there’s an array of documents teachers have to maintain regularly. A central location to store, organize, and manage all these documents is essential to properly keep track of them, especially when you are teaching remotely.
Tools such as GSuite, MS office, OneDrive, Dropbox, and Evernote simplify the process of maintaining the documents you own.
- Store all documents, files, etc. in the cloud which allows you and your students to access them with any device from anywhere
- Neatly organize documents in relevant folders and subfolders making it easy to retrieve them
- Quickly share files and documents with anyone with a single link or as a file. You can also adjust permission settings, changing them to Edit, View, and Suggesting mode on GSuite apps.
- Collaborate with students on editing and reviewing documents, add comments and suggestions and track changes with version history
Online Video Tools
YouTube and Loom are great online video tools for creating and sharing videos with your students. You can use these tools in a number of ways;
- Record your online classes or lectures and share them with students
- Students can re-watch the videos if they were absent or during exam revisions. You can also have the video recorded prior to the lesson and have it shared with the students when you are on leave
- If you are teaching the same lesson to different classes, you can make use of a pre-recorded lesson to avoid repetitive teaching
- Encourage students to learn independently with pre-recorded video lessons. The chance of students learning a concept better is higher when they understand it on their own
- Share links to existing video resources online
Online Quiz Makers
Whether you are teaching online or in a physical classroom, quizzes are a great way to check a student’s performance. Online quiz makers make it easy to,
- Create, format, and share assessments online
- Create answer sheets which allows you to easily track and score answers of each student
There is a plethora of online quiz makers that are both free and paid, starting from Google Forms.
Find more useful online quiz makers here.
Online Homework Platforms
One thing that is most challenging when teaching from home is keeping track of students’ homework.
Homework can come in different forms; essays, speeches, tests, etc. You can use a combination of the platforms above to get students to submit their homework.
- Google Docs – for essays and other written assignments
- Zoom, Skype, and other video conferencing apps – for verbal assignments
- Loom, YouTube, Prezi, Google Slides – for videos and presentations
- Google Classroom – Distribute assignments, grade and send feedback
Conclusion
There are plenty of free tools available for teachers to get their jobs done. From document sharing to assignment management, see our pick of the best free onlinLearning a new tool that can truly help you in your classroom can be a lifesaver. It may not seem like it when you’re crawling through the trenches, but once you have a resource to rely on, you’ll appreciate what you acquired.