Making classrooms better

When education is combined with technology, wonderful things can happen. Students are happier, more curious, and they receive the educational support that they need. Teachers are empowered to create engaging lesson plans, assess student’s needs, and effectively create a positive learning environment. Here are few best tech tools for teachers PLANBOARD planboardapp.com Planboard makes lesson planning a breeze. Individual blocks of time show what you’re doing on each day during each class period. Within each cell you can create a rich, dynamic lesson plan: The full text editor allows you to create bulleted lists, add horizontal lines to break up sections, and format the text size and color to make it easy to find the information you need. Add links to outside resources, embed videos, or attach files. Add standards to a lesson with the click of a button. As you add standards and sub-standards to various lessons, Planboard keeps track of your progress, so you have a record of which standards still need to be covered. SLACK slack.com Slack is a team messaging platform that is much more efficient and user-friendly than email for team communication. Messaging takes place on Slack through channels, which are like separate chat rooms for different conversations. A channel can be public or private, making it flexible for all kinds of communication needs. And it’s more than just messaging: Users can also attach files and hold side discussions about these files within the larger conversation. ZipGrade Anybody who is a teacher, or who lives with one, knows how much time they spend grading papers. With ZipGrade, teachers can create and print out assignments, and then they can grade them instantly by scanning them with the camera on their smart phone. All they have to do is align the squares on the grading sheet with the squares on the app. Paper.li Every day, teachers are working to teach students about a wide variety of topics. If they are trying to do so using the standard lecture model, chances are many of their students are bored to death. Paper.li was designed around the idea that students want to consume information in the same ways that everybody else does. In other words, not through lectures or boring texts, but through relevant content that is delivered in engaging ways such as newsletters. Edmodo Edmodo is a sort of online social media platform for the classroom. Teachers can create accounts and then invite both students and their parents to connect with them. This platform can be used as a place to engage in discussions, to send out announcements, and to create a collaborative environment involving parents, students, and educators. This is a great tool for those who want a social media type environment without all of the concerns associated with those platforms. Google Cardboard Many teachers have dreamed about getting kids excited and engaged by using virtual reality in the classroom. Unfortunately, even after the technology became mainstream, the cost of putting this technology in the classroom was simply too high. Now, Google has come up with inexpensive virtual reality goggles made from cardboard that has the potential to bring VR into all classes, not just the well-funded ones.