Nowadays, more and more students are bringing their phones, tablets, and laptops to class. While these items can be misused and usually underrated in some cases, they can provide you and your students with awesome tools to keep you organized and save you time on those pesky and not-so-relaxing teacher tasks we do behind the curtains.
Here are some apps you can use to alleviate these tasks and make yourself a better teacher.
Google drive is the perfect place to store your documents. It can store your current files, whether it’s a presentation or your lesson plan, and it will keep them safe and accesible from anywhere. Gone are the days of losing your thumb drive and losing all your files. Furthermore, Google Drive comes with a suite of apps that offer you tools such as presentations, a document editor, and spreadsheets, giving you even more power to your arsenal.
Price: Free
Alternatives: Microsoft OneDrive; Dropbox
Whether you’re an avid reader or want to keep up with the world of education out there, Reeder is one of the finest RSS readers out there. It lets you subscribe to websites so you can read the news or new information at your leisure. Whenever you open the app, it will populate with the latest articles or post from your favorite websites and/news sources. You can categorize your sources and personalize your app experience. Really handy when it comes to know what your district is up to nowadays.
Price: Free
Alternatives: Feedly
Arguably a jack of all trades-master of none kind of app, it is the most underrated productivity tool from Microsoft. You can use it to organize work notes, personal projects, travel planning, and your lesson plans by subject or class. Given its flexibility, you can basically do everything through OneNote. I highly recommend it for anyone who likes being organized.
Price: Free
Alternatives: Notability, Good Notes
Now that we are talking about organization, Trello has grown a lot on the last couple of years as a robust tool for just about anything. It’s great for to-dos, planning, wish lists, shopping lists, gym routines, and also lesson planing and course organization. If you don’t know where to start, Trello has thousand of templates you can try, from remote class templates to weekly planning. It is just a flexible app for you to experiment on.
More than a scanner app, Microsoft Office lens is great to take pictures of white boards and documents and with a little technology magic makes them better to read. It is just like having a pocket scanner, but on steroids. No matter how bad your angle is, this app gives you amazing results. If you use OneNote, you can save your saved images directly to it, too. It also has OCR support – so once you import the file you can actually edit the text!
Price: Free
Alternatives: Notes app on iPhone and iPad, CamScanner
This app helps you save all those articles and websites you find while browsing on your phone or computer. Its main feature is offline reading, but there’s also reader mode, tagging and a seamless cross-platform experience. You can also use it to share articles with your students.
Price: Free
Alternatives: Instapaper