Educational tech tools have a variety of uses, many of which empower the teacher to reach every student, gather important data, and become more organized. The following five tools do exactly that, putting more power in the hands of the teacher, allowing them to reach their highest potential as a teacher.

ClassDojo Messenger

Teachers often need a way to seamlessly communicate with parents to share important information and reminders. ClassDojo Messenger is just one tool on the market that gives them this capability, but what empowers the teacher is the newest messenger feature, “read receipts.”

Teachers are never sure if their emails or text messages have been read, making it harder to justify carving out time for sending them. With read receipts, the teachers know who read their message and who didn’t. If someone doesn’t read the message, teachers can reach out in another way, or address the parent directly.

Google Forms – Polling

Teachers become empowered when they know more about their students. This allows them to choose lesson styles, educational tech tools and topics more effectively. Google Forms empowers teachers to gain access to these important insights.

Student polls can be used at the beginning of the year, to gauge where each student is at, what they like and what they don’t like. They can also be used to survey students after using a new tech tool or during the middle of a lesson—see who’s paying attention with a mini pop quiz.

Whooo’s Reading

Teachers are empowered by data when it expresses information that will make their teaching more effective or personalized. Whooo’s Reading, an online reading log, not only makes reading fun for students, but it puts data in the hands of teachers.

Within the data section, teachers can access information about the Lexile Score of books students are reading, average score of the comprehension questions they answer, number of books read in a given period and more.

All of this information allows teachers to assess whether students are reading at, above or below their reading level. This data is especially useful in parent-teacher conferences and in-class reading interventions.

Reading A-Z

As a teacher, choosing texts that the entire class can read can be difficult. The leveled reading website, Reading A-Z, empowers teachers to reach every single student, while reading the same thing.

Teachers choose from the website’s collection of more than 1,000 different leveled texts, all of which can be read at 29 different reading levels. They can also use the “fluency passages” feature, which helps gauge students reading rate and accuracy.

Trello

This online tool empowers teachers to be more organized than ever before. Using various “boards,” they can sort and store lesson plans, save information for the weekly classroom newsletter, and manage student progress with projects or papers.

For the latter, teachers simply create a board for each student, and add notes during check-ins. This makes it easy to get a glance-and-go picture of how each and every student is progressing. Get more ideas for how you can use Trello in your classroom at Trello.com/Inspiration.

Written by: Jessica Sanders
Jessica Sanders is the Director of Social Outreach for Learn2Earn. She grew up reading books like The Giver and Holes, and is passionate about making reading as exciting for young kids today as it has always been for her. Follow Learn2Earn on Twitter and Facebook, and send content inquiries to social@learn2earn.org.