From keeping track of grades to sharing lesson plans, from helping students collaborate to communicating with parents, teachers now have a host of web-based tools at their disposal to help them stay organized and make their jobs easier.
Teachers have one of the most difficult and least appreciated jobs in the world, and most of them spend many unpaid hours after school doing extra work coming up with lesson plans and managing their classrooms. That’s why it is exciting that new tools are making it easier for teachers to manage the administrative tasks — like keeping track of attendance — so they can focus more energy on helping students learn.
Here is a collection of ten teacher applications that really make the grade. Do you know of any other applications that can be helpful for teachers? Let us know in the comments.
1. SchoolRack
SchoolRack is a free application for teachers to create classroom web sites. Using these class portals, teachers can interact with students and parents, post, collect, and grade assignments, communicate via mailing lists and private discussion boards, and send private messages to students.
2. SchoolTool
SchoolTool is a free web-based tool for school administrators. Unlike the other tools on this list, it isn’t hosted, but instead is a downloadable, open source application written in the Python language. That means to use it, teachers will need some technical knowledge. Though not the prettiest application, it is extremely useful, offering a grade book, attendance tracking, calendar, and contact management features. SchoolTool can even create report cards for each student based on the recorded grades.
For a hosted grading tool, check out Engrade, which is one of the most popular online grading apps for teachers. Engrade also offers a built-in attendance tracker and assignment calendar.
3. Curriki
Curriki is a collaborative project bringing educators together to share curricula with one another. Teachers use the site, which is unsurprisingly wiki-based, to share educator resources such as lesson plans, handouts, templates, and study guides. Though it takes some getting used to, Curriki is a great resource for teachers who need ideas for classroom activities.
4. Edmodo
Twitter is actually a great tool for use in the classroom, but unfortunately, because it is also a great tool for goofing off many schools have it blocked. Further, because it is a public network, there are serious privacy considerations involved when using Twitter with students. Edmodo, however, is something like Twitter, but designed specifically for use in a classroom setting, which makes it safer, more secure, and have more utility for teachers overall. Edmodo offers microblogging, link and file sharing, inline replies, a class calendar, and assignments and grading functions all in a Twitter-like package built with the classroom in mind.
5. Shmoop
Shmoop may have a really silly name, but it is actually an incredibly useful tool for educators, especially those working in a liberal arts setting. Shmoop offers study guides for literature, US history, poetry, and civics, as well as biographies of famous people. But what sets Shmoop apart from sites like Sparknotes is that the guides are written with kids in mind. Each guide is written with a down-to-earth, irreverent wittiness full of pop culture references that make the subjects more easy to grasp and more enjoyable for students.
Shmoop guides are written by mostly Masters and Ph.D. level college graduates from top Universities (two-thirds from Stanford, UC Berkeley, or Harvard), 91% of whom have taught at the high school or college level. Teachers can develop lesson plans around Shmoop content as a way to help digital age students connect with classic content.
6. Footnote
Another great content resource for educators is Footnote. Footnote is a collection of over 58 million original historical documents that history teachers can use to make history seem more real. What better way to connect students to something that happened a hundred and fifty years ago than to let them actually explore documents and original sources from that time? Users of Footnote can also annotate documents, to help others better understand them. Why not put students to work annotating historical documents to help them even better connect with history?
Educators will also want to check out Flickr: The Commons, a vast and growing collection of public photography archives from The Library of Congress, The Smithsonian, the Powerhouse Museum, the George Eastman House, Oregon State University, the National Galleries of Scotland, and many more.
7. ClassMarker
Unfortunately for students, not everything can be fun and games: sometimes teachers must test performance. ClassMarker is a full-featured online test and quiz maker, that lets teachers create quizzes with a mix of multiple choice, true or false, short answer, fill in the blank, and essay questions. Test questions can be randomized and results can be given to students instantly and emailed to professors.
8. Bookgoo
Bookgoo is kind of like document sharing site Scribd, but with the additional ability of users to mark up and annotate uploaded documents. With better privacy controls, Bookgoo would be a great tool for teachers to offer feedback to students on any sort of document — however, because of its lack of robust privacy features, take care when using Bookgoo with students. (That’s not to say that you can’t use Bookgoo — just be careful.)
For a more feature-filled solution, though at a higher cost, check out Backboard.
9. DOC Cop
While the web may have made it easier for students to copy other people’s writing, it also has made it easier for teachers to test student work against a corpus of preexisting material to catch plagiarizers.
One way to do that is to search for suspicious sentences in Google and do the detective work yourself. Another way to go about testing for plagiarism is to use a free web-based tool like DOC Cop, which does the heavy lifting for you and emails you a report indicating how much of the document may have been copied and where the copied lines may have originated.
Also check out Plagiarism Detect and WriteCheck for more robust detection.
10. TeacherTube
TeacherTube started out as YouTube for teachers, with the idea that video was a great resource for use in the classroom but YouTube was a little hard to sift through to find the best educational content. However, the site now also includes document, photo, and audio sharing in addition to video. For educators, TeacherTube is a great resource for finding educational videos for use in the classroom, or lesson plan ideas and tutorials from other teachers.
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