Early Childhood & K-12 EdTech

Back in 2001, when I started as a teacher, the technology boom was in its nascent stage. I remember toting a large bag filled with papers home most nights and going to sleep drowning under a vast sea of student homework that needed grading. My classroom was even worse, cluttered with books, manipulatives, globes, maps, and learning stations that left little room for anything else. However, as I write this in 2018, things have changed dramatically. Today’s teachers have edtech in their corners.

Digital teaching and learning tools have streamlined education processes and provide learning experiences that stretch far beyond the materials that were available for me back in 2001. Teachers used to have to meet in person to collaborate on lesson plans, assessments, or other projects. Now, with the proliferation of collaboration apps and tools, educators can work with colleagues from all over the globe, without leaving the classroom. Imagine the possibilities. If I were still in the classroom today, I’d use these collaboration apps, tools, and resources:

Google Apps for Education: Educators can make excellent use of the free apps available in the Google Suite for Education. Students can efficiently collaborate on their documents with a real-time display of who is editing which parts. Together, a group of students can prepare a presentation with a slideshow, create a diagram, and so much more.

Zoho Meeting: This program allows you to host and attend online meetings from your device. The Desktop Meeting Plugin lets you arrange or attend meetings from your desktop, connecting with only one click. Share and switch screens between the presenter and participants to share information efficiently.

Kami – Kami is the paperless teacher assistant, which allows teachers to create, upload, save, and share their materials using Google Drive and Classroom. It enables students to make notes, highlight, and add shapes on the PDF files shared in class. The app is available for free. The paid version comes with extra features such as the ability to communicate with an additional 150 students, an option for adding images, and text-to-speech technology.

Classpartoo – This is a cloud-based classroom management app that helps teachers deal effectively with their everyday tasks such as recording exam grades, attendance, and student behavior. This app also includes teacher communities where teachers collaborate and share material. School administrators, using this program can set up a functional SIS or integrate it with their existing SIS.

Eazyschool – This online software empowers every school to create, collaborate, and communicate. Its interface allows teachers, administrators, parents, and students to interact. Teachers can arrange report sheets, process child progress reports, and interact with other schools. It is a web-based application, which is compatible with various browsers.

Zoho Calendar: Make individual and group plans using the Zoho Calendar app. Set reminders ahead of schedule, up to 90 days. Groups can share their calendars with other members of the same group or outside the group. Email invitations also can be sent to any email platform from the app.

MURAL– Brainstorming is simple, easy, and fun with MURAL. The app allows multiple students or group members to work together to collaborate, share ideas, and determine solutions. It will help make thoughts concrete and visual, so they can be further evaluated. MURAL creates

Did we miss any?

Back in 2001, when I started as a teacher, the technology boom was in its nascent stage. I remember toting a large bag filled with papers home most nights and going to sleep drowning under a vast sea of student homework that needed grading. My classroom was even worse, cluttered with books, manipulatives, globes, maps, and learning stations that left little room for anything else. However, as I write this in 2018, things have changed dramatically. Today’s teachers have edtech in their corners.

When I was a teacher, helping students to become competent writers was a chore, though not an impossible task. Grading the written assignments of students was also a difficult task, as many of them butchered the English language and treated grammar as though it was a skill that could be disregarded. To further complicate things, if students needed help editing a paper or project at home, they were on their own.

Now, all of that has changed, well, sort of. Students have access to a host of grammar apps and tools that will not only help them correct their grammatical errors, but also teach them to be better writers in the process. If I were still in the classroom today, I’d use these grammar and writing apps, tools, and resources:

Grammar Pop– If you’re looking for a fun word game for adults or you want your kids to learn parts of speech as quickly as possible, the Grammar Pop is for you. With this fun game, you match words with parts of speech of pop clouds and advance from nouns and verbs to gerunds and participles.

Mingoville– With 10 missions, you can use Mingoville to learn English language. The app has a dictionary that is available in 32 languages and contains over 10,000 audio clips to help you learn to pronounce all types of words. There are also 130 games and activities that will reinforce spelling, reading, grammar, and pronunciation. If you love to sing, there are also 10 songs that you can sing along; you can also participate with your friends.

Quill– Quill is a writing tutorial app for teachers designed to help students become better writers. Quill is a nonprofit organization, and its goal is to provide tools such as Quill to help make students better writers. Quill uses web applications to create engaging content for students that helps them learn grammar, writing skills, and vocabulary. Using the teacher dashboard, you can monitor students’ progress according to the Common Core Standards; this feature also makes grading more intuitive and meaningful.

Turnitin for Educators: This website has a wide array of functions designed to help teachers check the integrity of their students’ work, and it helps them mark students’ work. It helps to prevent plagiarism by comparing the works submitted by students with a vast text comparison database, OriginalityCheck. The GradeMark function helps teachers give feedback and remarks to their students, and QuickMark enables them to mark students’ work directly.

Word Sort by Grammaropolis: This tool uses Grammaropolis characters to help teach the parts of speech. Children play by taking a word as it floats across the sky and dragging it into a container that holds the appropriate part of speech. It also has pages explaining parts of speech along with their grammatical function and game character personality.

Writing Challenge App: This app aims to guide students who want to do some form of writing but need some creativity nudging. The app delivers a prompt every minute, suggesting new ideas, characters, scenes, and even plots.

Grammarly– This platform helps the student to improve their grammar and build confidence in their writing ability.

Did we miss any?

Back in 2001, when I started as a teacher, the technology boom was in its nascent stage. I remember toting a large bag filled with papers home most nights and going to sleep drowning under a vast sea of student homework that needed grading. My classroom was even worse, cluttered with books, manipulatives, globes, maps, and learning stations that left little room for anything else. However, as I write this in 2018, things have changed dramatically. Today’s teachers have edtech in their corners.

Digital teaching and learning tools have streamlined education processes and provide learning experiences that stretch far beyond the materials that were available for me back in 2001. If the edtech of today were available back in 2001, I could have used classroom management tools to help me deal with my sometimes unruly 4^th period class. I could have used behavior management tools to develop and manage a student reward system. Parents could have logged on to an app to see whether or not their child was behaving themselves. Yes, sir, edtech would have saved me a lot of time, effort, and stress. If I were still in the classroom today, I’d use these classroom management apps, tools, and resources:

ClassDojo: This classroom management app can be a powerful tool when it comes to motivating students to maintain exemplary behavior. Teachers can give points or take them away when students don’t comply with the set expectations and rules of the classroom. Even better, parents can see this information quickly and easily.

Too Noisy: Do you have a rowdy class that often allows their volume to swirl out of control? Particularly for educators who have students with auditory sensitivities, the noise of the classroom may be overwhelming. Too Noisy demonstrates when the room is getting too loud with unique graphics that show how close you are getting to an intolerable level.itivities in their classrooms who may find a high noise level distressing.

Lan School – Lan School is a classroom management tool that works on Windows, Android, Mac, and iOS. It is a management software built to keep students engaged and learning while staying within the walls of a safe digital environment. It provides tools to monitor students’ screens to make sure that they stay on task. It also has a chat function that allows instructors to communicate with students and help them with their projects. The broadcast feature allows the teacher to broadcast his/her screen to the rest of the class.

The Great Behavior Game: This game is designed for educators who work with students in fifth grade or lower. The game allows teachers to award points and penalties for specific behaviors. The scoreboard can be used to issue rewards to winning students at intervals during the day. The app also allows educators to generate reports and collect data for future reference.

Classtime – Classtime is a classroom management solution designed for students and teachers; it includes analytics, real-time grading, and libraries. It allows teachers to create, share, and download lessons and assessments from over 30,000 available materials. It provides a time-effective solution for teachers in the classroom.

DyKnow –  DyKnow is a classroom management software solution that helps you monitor devices, reduce distractions, and keep students on task. This software enables teachers to see how students are spending time on their devices in class. It can restrict the students’ access; i.e., it can manage what a student can and cannot access during a course through a customizable blocking plan.

Eduphoria! – It is a classroom management tool that enables a learning environment through budget maintenance and education enhancement. Eduphoria! empowers teachers. The integrated apps assist in every aspect of the school day, from lesson planning to monitor student progress, streamlining administrative duties, and providing a collaborative platform for education professionals.

HiClass – This is a variable room management solution through monitoring, broadcasting, and more. HiClass computer classroom management software is very easy to use and offers a rich set of functions that enable teachers to broadcast, control, communicate, monitor, or collaborate with students individually or as a group, to ensure that every student gets the most out of class time.

Stop Go!: The time between classroom activity changes can be very disruptive with disorderly behavior. Using this app, you can bring order to the process. The app functions like a traffic light, signaling to students when the time is right to move or get to their seats. When the light changes, a bell also chimes in case some students might have missed the visual prompt.

Did we miss any?

Back in 2001, when I started as a teacher, the technology boom was in its nascent stage. I remember toting a large bag filled with papers home most nights and going to sleep drowning under a vast sea of student homework that needed grading. My classroom was even worse, cluttered with books, manipulatives, globes, maps, and learning stations that left little room for anything else. However, as I write this in 2018, things have changed dramatically. Today’s teachers have edtech in their corners.

Digital teaching and learning tools have streamlined education processes and provide learning experiences that stretch far beyond the materials that were available for me back in 2001. When it comes to digital learning in the early childhood or K-12 classroom, there is no shortage of apps will help teachers develop or find curriculum, or deliver instruction effectively.

Are you a teacher who is looking for apps or tools for their early childhood or elementary education classroom? Don’t worry I have some great recommendations for you. Below you will find a list of early childhood apps, tools, and resources that I would use if I were still in the classroom.

Montessori Preschool – is a comprehensive early learning app. It covers phonics, letter tracing, counting, shapes, colors… in a fun and engaging environment. With new games added every 2 months, the app also offers tons of activities to develop critical thinking, learn foreign languages and even think like a coder! With its carefully crafted designs, Montessori Preschool is beautiful to look at and answers a number of user requests such as child profile management, screen time management and even device space management. The app is free to download and 10 games are completely free to try. Users who want to try more have a 7 day free trial period before the subscription (monthly or yearly) starts.

Toca Hair Salon – Cut, color, comb, and style the hair of six different characters in your own hair salon! Children are in charge of their hair salon and have all the tools of a real stylist including scissors, electric hair trimmers, towels, shampoo, conditioner, and hair dryer. They can choose from 12 different hair dyes and 8 hair accessories

Funky Fruitilicious– The Funky Fruitilicious app helps children to learn in a delightful environment using visual learning techniques. The experience is most enjoyable when parents serve as a guide for their kids while playing it with them. The app is designed for preschoolers trying to learn the concept of counting and the basics of numbers. Funky Fruitilicious uses a variety of colorful game activities as well as funny audio sounds to improve kid’s learning.

Flashcard Stash– The Flashcard Stash is a new kind of flash card that is built on top of a dictionary, which enables you to look up the flash card words and save them. For instance, you can click on highlighted words for a quick definition or click on functions in the top right of every vocabulary flashcard such as synonyms, audio, and sentences. The AR Flashcards make learning fun and more entertaining for toddlers and preschoolers. With about 26 beautifully rendered animals to help your toddler learn the alphabet, learning is fun with AR Flashcards.

JumpStart Preschool – Your preschooler needs to have fun learning, and JumpStart Preschool gives you just that! It is designed for your little kids to learn pre-reading and critical-thinking skills while on the go. Your kids will learn to recognize and count numbers, practice shapes and colors while on the search for the best wiggly creatures to complete the collection. They will listen to stories by flipping through pages as words are read aloud.

Lexia Core5 Reading– Lexia^® Core5^® Reading is available to teach reading for preschoolers to fifth graders. It creates reading lessons based on research, to find the best ways to teach individual students or small groups. Using this app, teachers can organize their learning environments in the most productive and conducive way. This app can be used in combination with Lexia^® PowerUp Literacy™ and Lexia^® RAPID™ Assessment to optimize reading experiences and reading groups in schools.

Make A Scene: Farmyard– Make a Scene: Farmyard stimulates children’s creativity and allows them to design their own scenes. Little kids love cute farm animals, and this app has sheep, cows, ducks, chickens, and more. With hours of entertainment, they will learn and practice vocabulary, motor skills, and coordination simultaneously. They will be able to numerous scenes in this dynamic farmyard; for preschool to adult, this app will not disappoint.

Preschool Puzzle Math– Preschool Puzzle Math is a puzzle-solving game that teaches children math. It allows them to practice counting, simple addition, and subtraction. Preschool Puzzle Math helps your child develop the fundamental math skills that will help them going forward with mathematics. Your child learns to count, add, and find their way around tasking puzzle games with free-flowing gameplay. Suitable for ages three to seven.

Nico & Nor Coconut Star– Explore the Coconut Star World by solving puzzles using push, pull, and texture to get to new stars to win. This app provides a cheerful sojourn into the world of forces and motions using fireworks, water traps, and real-time feedback. The app provides opportunities for children to develop their scientific method skills. The Ramps program has two apps (Coconut Star and Ramps Journal) working hand in hand to help preschool kids and their teachers to record videos and results from experiments.

Monkey Preschool Lunchbox– Preschoolers love games and are the best at learning, so Monkey Preschool Lunchbox combines both these elements. Designed for two- to five-year-olds, this app has six games to teach colors, letters, counting, shapes, sizes, matching, and spotting the differences. Fun monkeys assist the child, and cute sounds and designs make it appealing to young eyes and ears. Children will also learn fruits and numbers. Virtual stickers provide positive reinforcement for a job well done.

Toddler Toy Factory: Help your kids improve their reading, spelling, memory, and hand-eye coordination using virtual toys. This matching game allows kids to pair identical toys. The “Make” room lets kids drag single letters into the toy machine to build toys. The toy is ready once the word is spelled out and then read out loud.

TeachMe: Kindergarten: Help your child ace kindergarten using this fun app. It contains all the subjects that children learn at the kindergarten level such as how to spell, write, add, and subtract. The app rewards student progress, and these rewards can be used to make in-app purchases. Parents and teachers can monitor the child’s development.

What did we miss?

Back in 2001, when I started as a teacher, the technology boom was in its nascent stage. I remember toting a large bag filled with papers home most nights and going to sleep drowning under a vast sea of student homework that needed grading. My classroom was even worse, cluttered with books, manipulatives, globes, maps, and learning stations that left little room for anything else. However, as I write this in 2018, things have changed dramatically. Today’s teachers have edtech in their corners.

Digital teaching and learning tools have streamlined education processes and provide learning experiences that stretch far beyond the materials that were available for me back in 2001. Back in the day, teachers would have to tutor struggling students before or after school. Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, teachers can use this technology to tutor students during class time. All they need is a tutoring app that uses artificial intelligence, and they are all set. The app will gauge the student’s present level of academic performance, and then present the student with learning experiences and assessments to help them achieve the desired level of academic performance. As a bonus, this technology can also be used to prepare students for classroom level and standardized exams. If I were still in the classroom today, I’d use these tutoring/test prep apps, tools, and resources:

iTalk2Learn– iTalk2Learn is a math tutoring app that uses cutting-edge technology to ensure that students learn more naturally. This app is the result of a three-year collaborative European project to create an open-source intelligent tutoring platform that reinforces math learning for 5- to 11-year-old students. This will enable educators to deliver the correct lesson at the right time.

LearnCube – This is a virtual classroom built for teaching and tutoring online. It helps to eliminate the distance barrier between teacher and students by bringing them together in a virtual classroom. It uses an online interactive whiteboard for teaching; users can draw, annotate, type, and switch to multiple boards while on the platform. The software makes use of high-quality audio and video encoders and compression algorithms for its virtual classes. Since all the content is web-based, there is no need for downloading and learning to use the software. LearnCube also provides the option for users to personalize the classroom.

MATHiaU– MATHiaU is math learning software is offered by Carnegie Learning. It provides college-level math assistance, including one-on-one tutoring. With this app, students take thorough assessments and are given feedback that includes a personalized learning path. MATHiaU provides affordable easy-to-use artificial intelligence based tutoring.

Chegg Tutors: Find tutors in every subject area for both high school and college students by looking at their previous reviews. This allows you to search for the person who is right for you based on your needs and possibly even personality. The best part is that they strive to make it affordable by offering a discounted weekly plan to help keep students on track.

Study Island: Since 2000, Study Island has been used by children in grades K-12 for learning in an entertaining fashion. It is relevant across different subjects including math, reading, writing, science, and social studies. It comes with interactive features and mini-games that aid learning and incentivize progress.

Study.com: This website carries over 1,000 courses made of short, fun videos taught by seasoned educators. The courses vary widely from psychology to calculus, food and nutrition education to PowerPoint lessons. They provide additional learning material for over a million monthly visitors, which include children and adults of all ages and educational status. The College Accelerator membership allows students to watch videos and gather credits that can be transferred to any of the thousands of colleges and universities that participate in the program.

EMsync – This platform helps with tutoring and mentoring of young people to help them succeed in school. This platform is designed to help ignite young people’s potential.

GradeSlam– GradeSlam provides online tutoring service with certified educators delivering interactive academic support to students whenever they think they need it to be successful. The service is unlimited, on request, and available on any device around the clock. The certified educators on this platform point out student’s mistakes during the learning process and guide them on how to avoid those mistakes next time.

Did we miss any?