Author: Alex Krasser

Five Digital Tools for Teachers in Edtech

The digital world plays a central role in both education and employment. Rather than replacing teachers, digital tools and educational technology are now valuable additions to their educational toolkit. Whether their classroom is physical or virtual, these five digital technologies can help both teachers and students thrive. Our educational blog breaks down these new developments and how teachers can benefit from them. 

No. 1 Interactive Lessons for Students

It’s no secret that video games are engaging. While educational games sometimes miss the mark, incorporating game-like mechanics into lessons — including interactivity, competition, and points systems — can be an effective way to grab students’ attention and make them active participants in their own learning.

A program like Pear Deck can turn a passive learning experience into an active one. Teachers can build a range of interactive mechanics into their presentations or online courses, like dragging, drawing, typing, or multiple-choice polls and questions. These multimodal interactives can serve as useful formative assessments, and teachers can integrate anonymous student responses into a thoughtful classroom discussion. 

Apps like GooseChase and Kahoot also use game-like mechanics to engage students, reinforce important information, and check for comprehension. Teachers can easily create games or multimedia quizzes in minutes, and students can play in groups in the classroom, on field trips, during science fairs, or as homework.

No. 2 Virtual Whiteboards for E-Learning

Sometimes teachers just need to draw something on the board. But in a virtual environment, why be limited to a digital dry-erase marker? With interactivity and collaboration at the heart of effective pedagogy, there’s more learning potential when every student has a marker. 

Virtual whiteboards offer so much more than their physical counterparts. Not only can one use them to illustrate concepts as needed, users can easily integrate digital media and empower students to contribute privately or in groups. 

Apps like Twiddla, Mural, and Miro are used by schools and businesses alike. These apps aren’t just whiteboards, they’re collaborative multimedia workspaces. Groups can review documents, images, and websites together, marking them up with drawings and annotations. They can chat, share files, and build diagrams, helping them tackle problems and projects together.

No. 3 Internet Annotation for Online Study

For better or worse, the internet has forever altered how information is accessed. No matter what is taught, there is relevant content online to share with students. The challenge is to make sure they get out of it what the teacher wants. 

Digital tools can help guide students to the right information. Like a digital whiteboard, apps like InsertLearning can turn any webpage into an interactive presentation. With it, users can highlight text, add notes and questions, insert a relevant video to add context, or facilitate a discussion. Videoant helps users do the same with videos; they can add annotations to specific moments and start a conversation.
Bounceapp and Diigo take it a step further: a user can save, organize, and share annotated web pages. Students can also collaborate, edit pages and add them to shared folders. In this way, students can work together to create a library of personalized resources.

No. 4 Digital Discussion Forums for Online Courses

Many of the best learning experiences are social. While there’s no shortage of social media on the internet, these public forums can have negative impacts on students without proper curation and guidance. Fortunately, education-specific apps exist to help marry the powers of social media and social learning. 

FlipGrid and Padlet give students a safe place to engage in meaningful discussion. Teachers post thought-provoking questions, and students can post their responses as videos, images, drawings, text, and more. They can also reply or comment on each other’s posts, helping them develop critical thinking and effective online communication skills.

Other apps, like Yammer and YoTeach!, provide students with private social networks and communication tools, giving them structured, moderated forums in which to communicate and collaborate both in-person and online. Teachers can even use these networks to communicate with parents. Other functions, like interactive polls, can increase engagement and provide teachers with valuable feedback. 

No. 5 Online Learning & Project Management

It’s easy to overlook logistics as an edtech tool, but something as simple as how teachers assign and collect homework can mean the difference between an assignment being done well and not being done at all. It’s not just about distributing or collecting resources; students can also benefit from clear project management, communication, and feedback structures. 

Learning management systems (LMS) like Blackboard, Canvas, and Schoology exist to address these very issues. But these are enormous programs designed for entire school systems and might feel like overkill for a single online classroom. Fortunately, there are many less-intimidating apps for teachers to use. 

To help assign, collect, grade, and give feedback on projects, Drawp and Kami are good options. Teachers can also use some of the tools’ functionalities to help manage workflows and collaboration, or teachers could use a dedicated project management tool like Trello to track who needs to do what by when.

Finally, there are one-stop-shops like Edmodo. This app can help teachers plan standards-aligned lessons, distribute and track resources and assignments, give feedback, design assessments, and communicate with students and parents alike. 
The smoother the e-learning and project management, the easier it is for teachers and students to focus on the content that matters most.