15 Back to School Apps for Teachers

Time to go back to school again. Just like their students, teachers also have to prepare and find necessary tools to get things going for the new term. From lesson plans, assignments and teaching ideas to creative detention punishments, teachers have a lot of groundwork to cover.

After all, teachers have to go to schools year after year after their students graduate. We’ve rounded up a list of tools teachers could use to get the grunt work done and take the edge out of a monotonous cycle.

Google Apps

Email is the preferred mode of communication for students and parents alike. Planning to pass on a report or feedback about a student? Calling parents at work may not be the most efficient option for both the parties. Shoot an email and that’s as official as it gets. Google Apps offers its services at discounted rates for educational institutions and if that is not something that your Principal will agreed to pay, there is always the free Gmail account.

EditGrid

EditGrid is an online spreadsheet app with extensive collaboration features. When you are planning for a school trip or scheduling classes for the upcoming semester, EditGrid can come in handy. Multiple users can edit the document at the same time and can also be embedded in the school’s official webpage or blog for everyone to see.

BRAINHoney

Asked to give a guest lecture at a school on the far end of coast or planning to give some extra coaching to interested students in weekends without having to haul them all the way back to school? BRAINHoney is the app that helps you solve the problem. With this web app you can create activities, assignments, quizzes, assessments or complete courses in alignment with new or existing state or school standards.

Edmodo

Edmodo is a social learning network for teachers and students offering a secure and closed social communication network. After seeing the adverse effects of the mainstream social networks, Edmodo is a welcome change and it offers link and file sharing, a class calendar, microblogging, inline replies, assignments and grading functions built into a Twitter like design.

Create Debate

What better way to improve self confidence and knowledge than taking part in debates? CreateDebate is an integrated and dynamic virtual learning environment designed to kindle discussion and participation in your classroom. The web app helps students to evaluate, analyze and synthesize on current topics of study with their peers by way of debates and intellectual discussions.

Backboard

Backboard is the easiest way for students to collect feedback and approval from their teachers. Once the document is uploaded into the system, students can invite you evaluate their work. Teachers can start highlighting errors, add annotations, quotes etc. right from their browser window. The app supports all popular document and image formats.

ClassMarker

Now that Learning Management Systems (LMS) are used in a lot of school campuses, creating a test has never been easy. If your school does not have a LMS, there is always ClassMarker to help you create quizzes with a blend of multiple choice, true or false, short–answer, plain old  fill–in–the–blanks or full length essay questions. This online test generator that allows teachers to embed the tests in websites, grade all the tests online and send the results instantaneously to students and parents as well.

Edublogs

Built on top of the popular WordPress platform, Edublogs offer a safe and easy way for teachers to create and manage blogs. With its quickly customized designs, a teacher can put together a great educational blog with tests, videos, photos podcasts etc., open to all the public or just to your students.

Engrade

The difficult part of an education process is actually making pupils to show up to classes in the first place. Resourceful kids might end up “tweaking” conventional attendance registers or make them go “missing”. To avoid those hassles, an online attendance system like Engrade will help a lot. Instant attendance reports can be mailed to parents or the details can be exported to get them printed.

Footnote

With almost about 69 million historical documents in the digital archives, Footnote is a tremendous resource for History teachers. Documents from the Library of Congress, National Archives and other prestigious institutions can be viewed in their original form. An interactive digital document beats printed material hands down and can make history real fun for students.

Plagiarism Detect

Wondering how that sleepy back bencher wrote a piece as good as Emily Dickinson all of a sudden? May be Emily Dickinson wrote it in the first place. It’s good to trust your students but always verify if they are writing on their own or lifting from the Internet with the help of Plagiarism Detect web app. There is also a plugin for checking documents directly from Microsoft Word 2007 instead of uploading it online.

Glogster

Glogster is an online tool to engage your students creatively. With this web app, students can collaboratively create digital posters – online multimedia documents with text, photos, videos, graphics, music, drawings etc. These Glogs can be showcased for other students, teachers and parents to see and rate the works.

SparkNotes

Feeling out of touch lately and not sure if your students are paying attention to what you teach? A visit to SparkNotes might solve the problem. SparkNotes has lots of study guides that are simple to read & understand for students. A look these study guides could help change your teaching style, more in line with your students’ learning curve.

Teacher Tube

The name says it all. Teacher Tube is the YouTube for teachers. Thousands of educational videos are available freely for showing them in classrooms. The content is mostly created by teachers and the site now has educational audio, documents and photographs as well.

Moodle

Moodle is the uber popular Learning Management System in the world. This self hosted LMS is free and open source and can be used to create effective online learning sites. The idea behind Moodle is to promote collaboration, activities, critical reflection, among students. From assignments, courseware, quizzes to Wikis and chat, Moodle has all the necessary tools for a digital learning environment.

Are you a student? We have an exclusive list of apps compiled for you.

Do you know of a web app that teachers could use? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments section.