Education and teaching have evolved significantly throughout the years, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Educators, parents, and students alike need better tools to promote better education. In this article, we list some of the new tools that are highly useful for education. Read on!
Seating Chart Maker
This tool helps you organize a classroom with ease. With this app, you can generate seating charts with just one click. Teachers can generate multiple seating charts, tweak arrangements with its drag-and-drop feature, and keep chosen students separated.
Using the app is also straightforward:
- Set Up Seats: create your classroom’s layout, pick desks and chairs, and place them freely using the drag-and-drop function.
- Create/Import Rosters: this app integrates with various third-party apps and spreadsheets, allowing you to transfer rosters quickly.
- Generate Seating Charts: after importing rosters, you can automatically generate a seating chart and print it.
A free trial is available for those who want to try it, while its yearly plan costs $11.90 — or less than a dollar per month.
Socrative
Socrative helps teachers create exercises and educational games that students can solve and play using their smartphones, laptops, and tablets. If you’re a teacher, you can see the results of the activities. Based on such results, you can modify the subsequent lessons to make them more personalized to the student’s needs.
Moreover, you can create virtual rooms to instantly engage students regardless of where they are. You can also encourage friendly competition among students during exercises through the app’s Space Race feature.
Socrative has a free version for teachers and students, where they have one public room for a class of 50 students. They can launch one activity at a time and easily share quizzes through URLs. Meanwhile, the paid plans are:
- Socrative PRO for K-12: $89.99 per year
- Socrative PRO for Higher Ed & Corporate: $179.98 per year
The paid plans offer a greater number of public or private rooms and allow multiple activities launched at once.
Classdojo
ClassDojo helps teachers encourage good behavior among students by allowing them to give instant feedback. Good disposition in the classroom is rewarded with points. Real-time notifications are also available when working on collaborative activities.
Teachers also have the option to share the information collected about the student’s behavior with their parents and school administrators. Meanwhile, students have portfolios that they can use to showcase and share their learning experiences. This feature is available on Chromebooks, iPads, and computers.
You can sign in as a teacher, a parent, a student, or a school leader when accessing the website. ClassDojo has a free version for teachers, while its Plus plan is perfect for parents who want to stay connected with their kids all throughout the day. A 7-day free trial is available; the plan starts at $4.99 per month, billed annually at $59.99.
Kahoot!
At this point, Kahoot! is a given — it’s a highly popular stool among US teachers. In fact, it ranked 7th out of the top 40 educational technology tools in 2021. Kahoot! is a free online educational game-creation tool for teachers, who can make trivia quizzes or games based on any subject and in any language.
Teachers can also create surveys, questionnaires, and discussions on the app to complement their academic lessons. The questions can be projected in the classroom or viewed through a web app by the students, who can play while learning. Students can collect points based on how fast they can answer or how many correct answers they have, while the teacher can choose to reward the students with the highest scores.
