Technology has entered the classroom. The only question is, is it helping your lesson or disrupting it? Yes, it’s very good at the latter. No matter how often we might yell at kids that they need to put away their smartphones, they’ll still find some way to peek and not pay attention. Fortunately, it’s not all bad news. You can also co-opt the device into your lessons and in that way make the learning experience better for all.

Here are some of the best apps to help you do exactly that.

Kahoot

Have you heard of this thing called ‘gamification’? It’s where you add game elements to otherwise normal situations. So you might add points and rewards and levels to otherwise normal activities, to give students a greater sense of accomplishment.

One of the best tools to easily do that is known as Kahoot. Here you can build free games for your students and thereby increase engagement and participation.

Seesaw

The more engagement you’ve got with parents, the more certain you can be that the child’s lessons don’t just stop when they walk out of the school but continue on the home front as well. One of the easiest ways to keep parents informed and involved is to give them direct access to some of the things that their children are accomplishing.

In effect, seesaw is a digital portfolio where the children (and you) can collect their accomplishments for the parent’s review. By giving parents one place to look for all this kind of stuff, they will be more likely to take a look.

It also means that kids can no longer play the 'anything’ line when asked about what they did in school today, thereby bypassing one of the biggest brakes on engagement that most parents face. 

Teach Learn Lead

One of the biggest breaks on teachers adopting new technologies in the classrooms is the lack of know-how. And that’s really not that strange. Schools, students, and parents make incredible demands on teacher’s and their time. They really don’t have time after all of that to go looking around for ways to teach themselves how to use new technologies.

Fortunately, there is a workaround. And that is to communicate with other teachers, as there is always going to be some teacher out there who has faced the same problem as you’re currently facing and has already worked out a solution. Teach Learn Lead is an app that allows you to find such teachers and get academic help (even while you share your own) so that you can the best website ratings and the greatest tools.

As an extra bonus, having a few more people working as cheerleaders in your corner is going to make teaching that little bit easier to do.

Classtree

Half the trouble with field trips is those horrible consent forms. Kids forget them, misplace them and even when they do get them filled out turn them into such a crumpled mess that nobody can read the parent’s signature.

Fortunately, nowadays you’ve got the internet to help you out in such regards. Specifically, you’ve got Classtree. This will allow you go get confirmation from the parent’s, without you needing to involve the clueless kids and their wild imaginations into the process.

And with that hurdle removed, you might be that extra bit tempted to give them another field trip that will give them the hands-on experience they so often lack.

Last words

And really, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many apps out there that do fantastic things that this list could be easily three or four times as long and there would still be apps we haven’t covered. At the same time, more is not always better and of these apps, we’re sure they work well.

For that reason, give them a try! Then, if you find that they’re working well for you, you can always decide to take on a few more apps. In that way, you’ll expand gently so that you can understand what each app is for and your students don’t end up overwhelmed and confused as to what app they’re supposed to be using today.