Technology has occupied all aspects of everyday life, making it practically impossible to imagine a person without some gadget in their hands. Indeed, almost all activities are now undertaken online, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the reality by its restrictions and social distancing requirements. As a part of technology, apps, with their numerous uses, have taken a particularly firm position in a lot of spheres including education. Teaching apps offer access to the best learning resources on any digital device, keeping students in the classroom on the distance and providing teachers with the invaluable additional materials and options to engage learners and improve their teaching techniques.

Pro-papers offers an enormous list of various educational apps that can be of help to both students and teachers. Here is a short description of some of them.

1. Google Classroom

Let’s start with the most obvious one. Google Apps for Education (now Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals) is the most conventional suite of tools used in millions of educational establishments all over the world. Google Classroom is one of the most widely used apps from it by the teachers. In it, you can create classes, distribute, and grade assignments, reach out to all the students, make announcements, initiate discussions, and provide feedbacks. As a result, it boosts engagement and collaboration, motivates, and enhances communication. As a part of Google Workspace suite, Google Classroom easily integrates with its other tools, in particular Google Drive and Google Docs, which are also invaluable in the educational process.

2. Google Drive

Google Drive is helpful not only in the corporate settings but can also be very useful in class for the purposes of storing and transferring important files including lecture notes, images, audios, and videos, slideshow presentations, direct source materials, and what not. They can be shared with anyone you grant the access to a respective folder. Since Google Drive is connected to other Google programs, it is easy to schedule the lectures and set a reminder for everyone in Google Calendar or create some new document in Google Docs, for example. An additional bonus is its cloud-based system, which means that any file can be accessed from any device without the fear of leaving them at home.

3. Zoom

Zoom is an undeniable leader of apps in the COVID-19 era. Of course, it is the fastest and the easiest way to connect with family and friends in the social distancing and forced isolation circumstances. The app has become the primary tool in millions of companies that had to hold meetings, conferences, or interviews with applicants. In education, it is the best way to gather the entire class for a lecture or any other teaching activity with the possibility to communicate, get the necessary feedback, provide instructions, or share lesson plans and guidelines.

4. Slack

Slack is a wonderful workplace messaging tool. It has occupied a firm place in the corporate world long before communicating online has become a mainstream in the COVID realities. However, it can be successfully applied in education to keep connected with the students outside the classroom hours. It is convenient to host office hours on the platform, send out reminders, share files, and hold voice and video calls. For students, it is a perfect tool for their group discussions and projects, especially if you want to get involved and provide necessary answers or useful feedback. In addition, the ability to create polls in Slack provides a splendid opportunity to get feedback and opinions from the learners.

5. TED

If you want to provide your students with a bulk of useful and interesting additional materials, you cannot do without TED Talks. The organization is a real treasure chest of knowledge in the form of insightful presentations on absolutely various topics, in a variety of subjects, from the best researchers, scientists, explorers, thinkers, politicians, and other people who have something extraordinary and fascinating to share with you. About 3,000 talks are uploaded to its official app right now. They can be watched, listened to, and downloaded for later. In any case, TED Talks can be a wonderful educational tool to ignite an intriguing debate in the classroom, developing their deeper understanding of some important issues, challenging their perspectives, and provoking their imagination and analytical and critical thinking.

6. Remind

When too many tests are scheduled and too many tasks are assigned, it is easy to get lost in them and forget about the due dates. Remind app gives teachers an opportunity to communicate with students and parents outside the classroom by sending them messages in real time with a reminder about this or that event or project. It can be used to make big class announcements, initiate small group discussions, or reach out to a single person individually. Additional features include the ability to schedule messages; attach images, files, and links; track statistics to see who got or read the message; and translate it in more than 90 languages.

7. Calendly

Calendly is an awesome scheduling tool that will especially appeal to teachers who work at several institutions or teach several subjects. You can combine several calendars in this app and use it on iPhone or Android. Just program your own time slots for each class in the needed school, out-of-class sessions with individual students, meetings with parents, faculty briefings, semester projects, or any other event and activity. Calendly can be similarly useful for students to schedule their appointments in career advising or with college advisors, exams, group projects, or sessions with teachers.

8. StudyBlue

Even in our highly digitized time, quick notes are an inevitable part of the learning process although pen-and-paper methods are already a history. The fathomless base of materials available at StudyBlue platform offers a wonderful opportunity to create a handy deck of flashcards for any purpose.  You can mold a personalized set of notes for the next lesson, compile a collection of useful ideas, facts, and concepts for the exam, or create a quiz. Besides, students can produce their own flashcard decks and even share them with others. Video and audio files can also be added.

9. Groovy Grader

One of the most favorite applications for teachers is definitely Groovy Grader. The tool can make your life much easier by relieving you of the tiresome grade calculation process. You will get a very simple technique of calculating the students’ final grades for them and their parents, which provides extremely accurate and fair results in whole numbers or decimals.

10. Addito

Addito is an app that makes the entire educational process digital, saving you from extra paperwork and making notes on stickers that can easily get lost. It is an invaluable classroom management tool and a digital grade book that enables you to take notes on attendance, participation, and performance, calculate grades, plan your lessons, and schedule your lectures. Addito app has rubrics for assessments, calculates average grades based on categories and subcategories, uses performance analytics, sends messages and can be integrated with Google Classroom to import grades.

11. Haiku Deck

Haiku Deck app is here to replace boring slideshow presentations overloaded with huge text blocks with attractive and visually focused ones, able to spice up the lesson with a fun and engaging activity. Its intuitive design and streamlined interface allow you to engage the students and enhance their comprehension. The app can be adapted to any subject and optimized to any platform. Besides, students also can use it for their creative projects.

12. Animoto

Animoto app can make classroom presentations even more engaging and interactive by enabling you to produce your own video. Indeed, in the process, even you will get more interested in the topic yourself. It is easy to create customized video-based presentations with a variety of pre-made templates and themes, a library of images, videos, and even background music, and an opportunity to write your own captions. You can access and edit them via cloud-based storage and keep your students interested all through the course.

13. Explain Everything

Explain Everything is actually like a dynamic virtual chalkboard at an online lesson. Generally, you get a blank canvas to do anything you want: you may write notes, drop in images, videos, and other animations, explain complex concepts, and actively cooperate with the students one-on-one or collaboratively. This kind of chalkboard is even better since you always have enough of space for any activity, and feedback loops that can be created in it gives the students a chance to respond to your enquiries.

14. Educreations

Educreations is another interactive chalkboard app. In it, you can also create handy tutorials with images, animation, videos, audios, or diagrams. Besides, you can record audio to provide the whole lectures for your students and share them via messaging, emails, and even social media platforms.

15. Kahoots!

Gamification is a wonderful educational tool that can help to turn boring lessons into interactive and fun activities that keep students engaged throughout the process. Kahoot! is a game-based platform that adds creativity to the teaching process and motivates the class. An instantly playable and incredibly competitive knowledge game can be easily created on its website by entering the necessary questions and answers. Students need to download the app and join the game with fun music and audio features, interacting with a teacher in an entertaining learning process.

Of course, there are a whole lot of other useful apps for teachers to help them in their activities. Here are only some of the most popular or handy. But the bottom line is that there is no need to stick to the old tried-and-tested techniques of the teaching process, especially now that the world is getting increasingly digitized each day. Technologies and their rapid development are here to help advance the profession and achieve much more improved outcomes. And this will become a reality with the variety of apps developed specifically for teachers.

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