15 Cool Tech Tools for the New Year

Students submit responses by answering multiple-choice questions, drawing, or typing, and teachers can send back detailed feedback. The dashboard offers great at-a-glance progress tracking.

Use Formative as your go-to tool for capturing students' responses in class or following at-home assignments. Start with the simple tutorial and experiment with the pre-made assignments to consider what might work best for your classroom. Make short multiple-choice questions to use as bell ringers or exit tickets to start or end your lesson.

Great for secondary teachers who want to upload their maps/formulas...

GoFormative.com

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Lets teachers immediately gauge student learning, instantly respond, or give students instant access to peer ideas.

You can create quizzes in Microsoft Excel using a template or import quizzes shared by a colleague in Socrative.

Once a quiz is created, you can then administer it at a controlled pace or allow students to go at their own pace.

Socrative.com

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EdPuzzle is one of my favorite tools. It gives teachers a set of tools to crop an existing online video to just the moments needed for a specific teaching purpose. Teachers can also customize the cropped video with voice-overs, audio comments, as well as embedded assessment questions. Crop any YouTube video. Download the EdPuzzle extension in Chrome and the EdPuzzle button will be nestled under every YouTube video you view. It's a great reminder.

https://edpuzzle.com/

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Fast, right-or-wrong feedback is provided on kids' devices and the class screen. The multiple-choice quizzes may tend to favor memorization, but having kids create Kahoots allows for higher-order learning.

Kahoot! is one of the rare, great tools that you can learn about today and actually use tomorrow as a go-to formative assessment

Teachers access Kahoot @ Getakahoot.com

Students access Kahoot @ Kahoot.it

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Quizlet Live makes it possible for students to participate in a competitive vocabulary review game against their classmates from any device. What makes Quizlet Live unique is that students compete on randomly assigned teams of three or four students. Even better: The correct answer for each question asked during the game appears on only ONE group member’s screen. The result: When a question is asked, teams need to first figure out what the correct answer is and then figure out which partner has the correct answer on their screen.

Quizlet

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Quizizz is an assessment tool that can be used as an in-class quiz game or assigned for homework for students to complete on their own. The reports make it easy to use quiz results to inform instruction. The teacher can see how students performed on each question and use that information to figure out what needs to be retaught or readdressed as well as which students might need some individual or small group reinforcement.
https://quizizz.com/

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Lucidpress makes it easy for all students — from those in elementary school to those in advanced digital communication courses — to create stunning content that brings their big ideas to life. Teachers can also create visual learning aids, posters, and other teaching collateral with just a few clicks of the mouse
Lucid Press Website
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Nearpod is the go-to tool for interactive presentations and assessments. At the Nearpod website, teachers create their own multimedia presentations or use a growing library of pre-made offerings
Nearpod Website
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Flipgrid is a video response platform that allows educators to host video based discussions with students.

Educators create topic grids and students respond with recorded videos to discuss, reflect, and share via webcam, tablet or mobile device.

Flipgrid Website
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Seesaw is a digital portfolio that allows kids to save and submit a variety of work -- videos, photos, text, and drawings. They can reflect on their work in writing or with a voice recording when they submit it, and teachers can offer feedback as well. Teachers can then approve items to make them accessible to parents. When teachers set up their classes, they can print a handout with a QR code to give to parents explaining how to register and download the parent app (which is available online, on Android, Chromebook, and iOS) in a variety of languages. Alternatively, teachers can email parents a prompt to sign up for Seesaw. If you're using Google apps, it's easy to get students in the system: They can use their existing Google accounts.
Seesaw.com
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Piktochart is an online tool (website and Chrome app) for creating infographics. Combining charts, graphs, text, and graphics, users can easily assemble and present information using the drag-and-drop interface. Although it's generally geared toward adults in the workplace creating business presentations, Piktochart clearly lends itself to student use
Piktochart.com
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An amazing creation suite for both teachers and students, Adobe Spark is easy to use and offers plenty of inspiring templates to get started. You can browse the Education section of the Inspiration Gallery and filter by project type (Pages, Posts, Videos) to get ideas. The Post tool is great for creating flyers or posters, which can be printed and displayed in your classroom. Students can create collages and graphic images to accompany lessons on any subject. Use the Page tool to design a scrolling, interactive lesson plan or have students create web stories to present their research or bring a narrative to life. The third creation tool, Video, allows teachers and students to select music and record their voices over slides that tell a story, argue a position, or describe a research project. For students, the key is figuring out how to organize and visualize their ideas. These tools offer rich opportunities to demonstrate learning while getting creative with design elements.
Adobe Spark Website
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Easel.ly is an infographic creation tool that guides users to build visual and text representations of a concept or idea. Easel.ly provides some themes and many objects, but it is up to the user to search through these materials and organize them into a cohesive infographic. Fortunately, the website offers an option to share finalized products, so there are many public infographics to choose from for a template. The site is easy to navigate, and progress on a project can be saved for later. Infographics can also be saved to a group, which simply allows other users to quickly find and view the work.

Easel.ly.com

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Padlet is a visual collaboration tool that allows users to easily express their thoughts on a common topic and read what others have to say. It is essentially a virtual bulletin board in which collaborators can simultaneously create and organize posts of any content type, whether it be text, documents, images, videos, links, etc.

Padlet Website

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Google Expeditions is a virtual reality teaching tool that lets you lead or join immersive virtual trips all over the world — get up close to historical landmarks, dive underwater with sharks, even visit outer space

Google Expeditions Website

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