Looking for online tools for teachers? Wanna help teachers find the best online tools out there? Tired of choosing between low-quality and irrelevant tools and guides that turn into spam and clutter your inbox ? You’re in the right place: we’ve found the best online teaching tools available to date – you can use them straight away, they’re free and we’re sharing them with you.
Here are the best tools for teachers and students.
Google Classroom
Created for teaching and learning, Google Classroom is an all-in-one tool that makes learning flexible and accessible from anywhere in the world. Teachers save time when creating lesson plans, tracking student performance and using several creative tools to make course material more exciting.
Currently, there is a free version of Google Classroom. However, a paid version is on its way with add-ons and easy integration with other educational tools.
Prodigy Math Game
Prodigy Math Game is an adaptive learning platform for grades 1 to 8. Aligned to curriculum across the United States and around the world, you can be confident that students will stay engaged and learning no matter where they are.
Use your free teacher dashboard to easily differentiate math practice, send home assessment and get real-time insights into how students are learning — no grading required.Sign up now
Pear Deck
Pear Deck is a Google Slides add-on that helps teachers create engaging slides and support student interaction. Teachers can create presentations from scratch or add interactive questions to existing presentations.
Pear Deck has amazing features including a dashboard that’s available on a phone or tablet, the ability to show or hide student responses, features that let you send personalized notes to individual students and fun audio files to add to presentations.
Flipgrid
Flipgrid is a fun way to get a conversation started. Simply post a topic and foster discussions within your learning community. It’s a great way to get students interested in new ideas, excited to learn and engaging with their peers!
Canva
Canva’s online graphic and publishing tool allows teachers to create stunning, professional-quality presentations, posters, infographics, social media banners, videos, Zoom virtual backgrounds, and more. Sign up for the free version or purchase one of their plans geared toward teachers and students.
Canva easily integrates with your preferred learning management system, including Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams.
Zoom
Zoom gained popularity during the pandemic for its versatility as a presentation tool and webinar platform while students learned online. Its security, live video class functionality and chat feature for social interaction make Zoom a useful distance learning tool.
Blackboard
Blackboard is an advanced LMS tool perfectly suited for kindergarten to high school. This platform works on any device and it’s easily accessible to all students. Blackboard Learn also gives teachers access to several third-party tools.
ClassDojo
ClassDojo’s communication tool brings families, students and teachers together to create a supportive online community. Teachers can develop a fun learning experience with downloadable resource kits and ideas. They can also find resources that help integrate ClassDojo with their preferred learning management system.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams brings the best of several worlds together under one roof. You can share your screen or notes, conduct presentations, promote chatting and bring everyone together through video conferencing.
Edmodo
Edmodo is an educational tool that connects teachers and students, and is assimilated into a social network. In this one, teachers can create online collaborative groups, administer and provide educational materials, measure student performance, and communicate with parents, among other functions. Edmodo has more than 34 million users who connect to create a learning process that is more enriching, personalized, and aligned with the opportunities brought by technology and the digital environment.
Socrative
Designed by a group of entrepreneurs and engineers passionate about education, Socrative is a system that allows teachers to create exercises or educational games which students can solve using mobile devices, whether smartphones, laptops, or tablets. Teachers can see the results of the activities and, depending on these, modify the subsequent lessons in order to make them more personalized.
Projeqt
Projeqt is a tool that allows you to create multimedia presentations, with dynamic slides in which you can embed interactive maps, links, online quizzes, Twitter timelines, and videos, among other options. During a class session, teachers can share with students academic presentations which are visually adapted to different devices.
Thinglink
Thinglink allows educators to create interactive images with music, sounds, texts, and photographs. These can be shared on other websites or on social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook. Thinglink offers the possibility for teachers to create learning methodologies that awaken the curiosity of students through interactive content that can expand their knowledge.
TED-Ed
TED-Ed is an educational platform that allows creating educational lessons with the collaboration of teachers, students, animators—generally people who want to expand knowledge and good ideas. This website allows democratizing access to information, both for teachers and students. Here, people can have an active participation in the learning process of others.
cK-12
cK-12 is a website that seeks to reduce the cost of academic books for the K12 market in the United States and the world. To achieve its objective, this platform has an open source interface that allows creating and distributing educational material through the internet, which can be modified and contain videos, audios, and interactive exercises. It can also be printed and comply with the necessary editorial standards in each region. The books that are created in cK-12 can be adapted to the needs of any teacher or student.
eduClipper
This platform allows teachers and students to share and explore references and educational material. In eduClipper, you can collect information found on the internet and then share it with the members of previously created groups, which offers the possibility to manage more effectively the academic content found online, improve research techniques, and have a digital record of what students achieved during the course. Likewise, it provides the opportunity for teachers to organize a virtual class with their students and create a portfolio where all the work carried out is stored.
Storybird
Storybird aims to promote writing and reading skills in students through storytelling. In this tool, teachers can create interactive and artistic books online through a simple and easy to use interface. The stories created can be embedded in blogs, sent by email, and printed, among other options. In Storybird, teachers can also create projects with students, give constant feedback, and organize classes and grades.
Animoto
Animoto is a digital tool that allows you to create high-quality videos in a short time and from any mobile device, inspiring students and helping improve academic lessons. The Animoto interface is friendly and practical, allowing teachers to create audiovisual content that adapts to educational needs.
Kahoot!
Kahoot! is an educational platform that is based on games and questions. Through this tool, teachers can create questionnaires, discussions, or surveys that complement academic lessons. The material is projected in the classroom and questions are answered by students while playing and learning at the same time. Kahoot! promotes game-based learning, which increases student engagement and creates a dynamic, social, and fun educational environment.
Yammer (yammer.com)
Yammer is a private social network. Work in groups, share files, co-edit content and more with their free Basic plan. Explore “5 Ways Yammer is Improving Communication, Connections, and Learning in our Schools†to learn more.
Skype (skype.com)
This popular, widely known platform provides for group meetings tools that can be particularly effective for remote participants to come together. For example, if you’re thinking about collaborating with a remote classroom, Skype can be huge asset in doing so. Skype is also great from bringing students who might be stuck at home due to illness or other situations into the classroom to join the class for a collaborative dialogue or other activity.
Vyew (vyew.com)
Vyew is a collaborative interactive white board. It’s come a long way since we first covered it on EmergingEdTech years ago. Not only can you create a collaborative whiteboard on line, you can upload images and document and write over them, have a discussion around them, and more. Check out the “What is Vyew†video on their home page to learn more. The free version only allows for a small set of users (10 real time participants), but that can work well if you set up a few separate groups. Larger groups of participants aren’t too expensive, starting at $10/mo.
Wikispaces (wikispaces.com)
Wikis provide an easy place to create a members-only web site where users can have discussions, share documents and so on. Wikispaces was built for education. They even have a special “classroom†tool that is focused on Collaborative Writing: Wikispaces Classroom.
Facebook (facebook.com)
Yeah, that’s right – Facebook. If you put up a group page specifically for your class, you get a place of you own to collaborate. Of course, this is only for kids over 13. There are a lot of teachers using Facebook. Check out Facebook Summit 2011, an Excellent Academic Use of the Popular Internet App to learn about one teacher’s fun project using Facebook.
Conclusion
The internet has become a very important tool for teachers and students. The online tools have made communication between teachers and students increasingly efficient and effective. It is now easier to learn for our children as they have access to a lot of information within the click of a button from any part of the world.