Attention teachers—are you looking for ways to maximize your effectiveness and improve your classroom experience, and make this year’s crop of students happy that they had the opportunity to work with you this academic year?
As a teacher, you’re more than aware of the value of investing in additional resources and supplies to bolster your lessons and planning—in fact, for many teachers, these extras are absolutely essential. But did you know that thanks to the recent wave of technological innovation there are a wealth of free and low-cost resources that you can take advantage of to help support your teaching efforts? Yes, we’re talking apps, and we’re going to recommend some of the top ones for you to download before the school year is over. Consider the following four options to make your year get even better.
Kahoot
Learning doesn’t have to always be serious or boring, and Kahoot is proof—this helpful app let’s teachers take their lesson review questions and turn them into fun, interactive quizzes that students can use to practice and review key concepts and build their skills. It makes getting your students motivated to learn learn easier, and they get to have a little fun along the way—a total win-win situation.
Seesaw
This award-winning app is the perfect conduit between parents and student performance—it creates individual digital student-driven portfolios in which their classroom progress and best work can be posted and shared with their parents. Seesaw also allows students to help manage their learning in a new and creative way, and it helps you keep their parents in the loop and on top of every facet of their child’s development in your classroom—from strengths and weaknesses to changes in performance and skill acquisition. Best of all, the developers of this app have made it completely free for teachers.
Remind
Who among us doesn’t benefit from a helpful reminder every now and then? The folks behind Remind are fully aware of this, and have developed an app that helps teachers bolster their communication with students and parents—all in one helpful place. Everything from individual and group chats to sharing files and content and important classroom updates and announcements can be facilitated through the app (and translated into different languages if need be). It’s a great little teacher’s assistant that fits in your pocket.
Additio
Take your classroom management to the next level (and out of the clunky notebooks) with this helpful all-purpose app, designed to help teachers handle some of the routine administrative components of their jobs—everything from attendance records to class and student notes and grades can easily be completed and stored here. There are also a host of planning and data analysis features that you can use to track and grade student progress and keep organized and on top of things. (Some of these features come at a cost, but it may be worth the investment.)
We all know that being a teacher challenging, but there are tools designed to help make it a little easier. The apps mentioned here are specifically designed for teachers to help bolster classroom learning and skill building, keep the lines of communication with students and parents strong, and store all the files, records, and paperwork teachers are responsible for in one handy place.
