Teachers – Computers & Technology

General and Miscellaneous Resources

AI Tools

16 of the best AI and ChatGPT content detectors compared: We tested the top detection tools for AI-generated content. Here’s what they are good and bad at, plus what to expect when using them
AI Issues and Pedagogical Strategies: A collection of articles and information about AI and education.
Best AI Presentation Makers: In this article, I want to touch on the use of AI in creating effective and engaging presentations. More specifically, I will introduce you to some of the best AI presentation makers that will help you create beautiful and professional presentations in just a few clicks. The article includes links to lists of other “best” AI tools including text-to-media generators, text writers, music generators, and more.

General Educational Technology Resources

9 Basic Digital Skills for the 21st Century Teacher: Lists nine core digital skills for educators and links to tools which can be used for each one. (Dec. 2019)
20 Collaborative Tools for Your Classroom That Are NOT Google: Podcast and article about 20 tools capable of being used to facilitate collaboration inthe classroom, with a short video about each too. (updated Jan. 2023)
27 Formative Assessment Tools for Your Classroom: Formative assessment is such an essential part of the learning process and student success, and many digital tools can help support this process. (July 2021)
Bernie Poole’s Free Office Tutorials: Includes tutorials for Office 2000 through 2019/365, LibreOffice 4x through 7x , and PGP.
Best Free QR Code Sites for Teachers: QR Codes can be a great way for teachers to distribute class material. Here are free sites you can use to generate QR codes.
BFTP: 10 things teachers can do to protect student data: Educators, each year an increasing amount of information about your students is being communicated and stored – especially in electronic formats. Here are 10 simple things you can do to protect your data and your students’.
Castle Learning News: Keep informed with current news and updates from Castle Learning.
Common Sense Education: Selections for Learning: The Common Sense seal program recognizes outstanding media with an official seal for quality and impact. Common Sense Selections for Learning are best-in-class media resources and tools that facilitate great learning experiences for students and educators.
Cool Cat Teacher: Teacher Vicki Davis has a blog and YouTube Channel with all sorts of tips for teachers using technology.
Ditch That Textbook: Blog and resources about teaching, including both edtech and general pedagogy.
edshelf: A socially-curated discovery engine of websites, mobile apps, desktop programs, and electronic products for teaching and learning. Search or browse through categories, choose filters to narrow your search, and create your own shareable shelf of your top resources.
EdSurge Product Index: A tool for teachers to compare various edtech tools and see ratings for interoperability, privacy, accessiblity, etc.
Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: Blog and free resource of educational web tools, 21st century skills, tips and tutorials on how teachers and students integrate technology into education.
Guide to Pinterest for Educators: This handbook provides teachers and administrators with the tools needed to not only navigate Pinterest, but also to use the social platform as a powerful learning tool for both teachers and students.
ISTE – Standards: The ISTE Standards (formerly the NETS) are the definitive framework for successfully implementing digital strategies to positively impact learning, teaching and leading in our technology-powered world. ISTE offers a host of information and resources to support understanding and implementation of the standards at a variety of levels.
OER Commons: OER Commons is a dynamic digital library and network. Explore open education resources and join our network of educators dedicated to curriculum improvement.
Planboard: Planboard is a free online lesson planner and gradebook
Power My Learning: Find and use thousands of FREE games, videos, and interactives in all major K-12 subjects and aligned to the Common Core.
Stopwatch: Need to time a lab, a contest, or other event? Try this or one of the other timing tools here. (Or just type “stopwatch” into Google for their tool.)
Student Privacy Primer: Discusses student data, how it can be used, and risks of insufficient protection of student data privacy. A Student Data Privacy and Data Ethics Scenarios User Guide lets teachers look at ways student data might be handled and options for doing so while protection student privacy. (From ConnectSafely)
Tech Trumps: [T]his curated list of Tech Trumps® summarise the affordance of free apps in the context of six dimensions of teaching and learning. Which one is right for you?
Tools to Improve the Accessibility of Documents, Slides, Videos, and Websites: We all have different needs and preferences when it comes to consuming the media in our lives. … Some need webpages read aloud, some need different color schemes or fonts, and others need captions enabled on videos. … Here are some tools that you and your students can use to improve the accessibility of media used in your classroom.
Webtools: No Registration Needed for Students: This page offers an annotated list of free online tools which don’t require students to sign in with a real email address.
What is Augmented Reality?: AR uses screens and cameras to overlay digital objects on the real world. As such, it is ideal for use in schools as it can create virtual items that might otherwise be prohibitively expensive or dangerous to have in the room. … This guide aims to explain all you need to know about augmented reality in education.
Word Clouds: some sites: EdWordle — Tagxedo — WordArt — Word Cloud Generator (Chrome) — WordClouds.com — WordItOut

Digital and Information Literacy

5 Myths About Teaching Technology Skills to 21st Century Students: Although this article designed to let’s myth-bust common misconceptions about the tech-savvy 21st century students was published in 2019, its points are just as valid today.
Checkology: From the News Literacy Project, Checkology’s lessons and other resources show you how to navigate today’s challenging information landscape. You will learn how to identify credible information, seek out reliable sources, and apply critical thinking skills to separate fact-based content from falsehoods.
Civic Online Reasoning: Students are confused about how to evaluate online information. We all are. The COR curriculum provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world. Free from Stanford.
Common Sense Media: Tips, articles, and research materials on Digital Citizenship and related topics for parents and teachers.
Developing Digital Literacy Skills: To be digitally literate you need to be able to navigate, evaluate and create using all forms of digital technologies, for example, smartphones, laptops and computers. In this series, we will look at the 8 key components of digital literacy and give you 8 short guides on how to teach your students these important skills.
Digital Citizenship: Digital citizenship can be defined as the norms of appropriate, responsible behavior with regard to technology use. … These resources can be used by any anyone who is interested in helping students or others better understand appropriate technology use.
Digital Literacy: The Learning for Justice Digital Literacy Framework offers seven key areas in which students need support developing digital and civic literacy skills. Includes lesson plans for a range of grade levels from K to 12.
EDUCAUSE: EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. Also publishes EduCause Review.
Empire State Information Fluency Continuum: This ESIFC reflects several new aspects that will enable librarians and classroom teachers to integrate the teaching of information fluency skills across the curriculum and across all grade levels as they empower students to develop confidence and agency to pursue their own paths to personal and academic success.
Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning: While this toolkit from the Stanford History Education Group is from 2016, the tools and techniques it offers for analyzing news and information are still valuable and usable.
How “News Literacy” Gets the Web Wrong: Describes a simple method of checking ‘upstream’ and lateral sources to determine trustworthiness of news articles rather than focusing on trying to analyze a site or article in isolation, as some methods rely on.
How to Teach Digital Literacy Skills: In this post, you’ll find tips and resources to help you teach digital literacy in your classroom. You’ll also discover how to use digital curriculum to easily teach these skills as part of your overall course. (April 2020)
Information Fluency: Resources to help educators and students improve their ability to locate, evaluate and use digital information more effectively, efficiently and ethically.
ISTE: International Society for Technology in Education: A nonprofit membership organization, ISTE provides leadership and service to improve teaching, learning, and school leadership by advancing the effective use of technology in PK–12 and teacher education.
Media Smarts: Digital Literacy 101: The intent of these resources is to support teachers in implementing digital literacy into their teaching practice and to help them to develop digital literacy lessons and activities that suit their students’ needs.
Microsoft Digital Literacy course: Features five courses that cover computer basics; using the internet and productivity programs; security and privacy; and digital lifestyles.
New York State Computer Science and Digital Fluency Learning Standards: As required by a 2018 law, NYSED engaged with workgroups of stakeholders, including teachers, administrators, parents, and business/industry professionals to develop computer science standards that will prepare all NYS students to live and work in our dynamic, technology-driven 21st-century world.
Northstar Digital Literacy Assessment: Northstar Digital Literacy tests your computer skills. You can build skills in key areas, and demonstrate your knowledge by earning certificates and badges
Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers: This … practical guide … supplements generic information literacy with the specific web-based techniques that can get you closer to the truth on the web more quickly. Instead of checklists, this guide emphasizes four moves – strategies which can be used with any source.

Distance Learning

4 Ways to Craft Choice Menus in Distance Learning Classes

Students can feel overwhelmed when things are too loose. … For this reason, it can help to create structures for student choice. One option is through the design of a choice menu. Article and podcast.

7 Guidelines for Setting Up Clear Online Lessons

The way a lesson is laid out online can make all the difference in whether a student can follow along and execute it successfully.

BlendSpace

Online posters and presentation tool which allows sharing of images, videos, documents, and webpages in a clean visual format. Includes quizzes and progress tracking. (Formerly ‘TES Teach with BlendSpace’)

BT BOCES Instructional Technology Toolkit

Tutorials and links relating to technology tools in education. This set of pages is an update to BT BOCES School Closure Toolkit published in the spring of 2020, though some of the latter may still prove useful.

Curriki

Offers free materials to use or adapt. (Sometimes you have to drill down several layers to get to the actual material.)

Four Engaging Structures That Work in Hybrid A/B Learning Classrooms

[T]he question … has been: How do I structure the learning experience so kids at home and in-class are both learning? Below I share four different models that I have seen work and that teachers are using around the country (and world) in Hybrid A/B learning.

How do I ensure students are engaged with each other and the content in a hybrid and/or remote learning environment?

This guide offers a set of concrete, common practices and related strategies captured from educators working in classrooms from across the country.

Google Teach from Anywhere

This is a handy website with all sorts of tips for using Google tools in remote teaching and learning.

Kaizena

Kaizena is a Google Chrome addon for grading and giving feedback digitally. It allows not only text review but also verbal recording of messages, and linking to other sites, as well as a tagging system.

NY Public Library: How to Access the Library’s Digital Resources 24/7

Discover the Library’s wide range of digital resources — including e-books, databases, our Digital Collections, and more. Once you have your digital library card, check out NYPL’s Remote Learning Resources for Educators and their Digital Collections while you’re at it.

NYSED: Quality Remote/Hybrid Teaching: The Flexible Futures Instructional Framework (PDF)

A framework from the New York State Education Department designed to build the capacity of teachers and educational leaders to effectively implement remote/hybrid learning for all students, and to adapt and respond to evolving educational environments. (June 2022)

PBS Learning Media – Interactive Lessons

Browse by subject or grade level. Integrates with Google Classroom.

The Power of Visible Thinking in Virtual Learning

When students process information visually and make their thinking visible, they improve in their metacognition and the learning tends to stick. In this article, we explore how to make this happen in virtual learning. (Jan. 2021)

Some Practical Tips on How to Use Google Docs in Your Distance Education

This article discussese co-editing documents, sharing instantaneous feedback, suggesting edits, and the ability for up to a hundred users to share and collaborat on the same file.

Virtual Field Trips

Google & Google Apps

9 Chromebook and G Suite for Education features to make learning more accessible: Reviews some features that may help students with special needs, and some (such as live captioning in Google Meet) that may be generally useful. (Oct. 2020)
Apps that work #withClassroom
85+ Awesome Apps that Integrate with Google Classroom: Find Google and non-Google apps that work with Google Classroom.
Anson Alexander – Latest Google QuickStart Tutorials video: Quick start tutorials for using the different products and services developed by Google. Including Google Apps, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Chrome.
Chrome App and Extension Database for Teachers: The database includes 160+ Apps and Extensions and is searchable and filterable. I do not recommend every app and extension for every teacher. Rather, use this as a guide to find what works for you, your classroom and your students. There is something in here for everyone. From the Shake Up Learning blog.
Chrome Story: Chrome Story currently covers the latest news on Chrome and Chrome OS. We also write how-to articles to help Chrome OS users get things done on their Chromebooks.
Chromebook App Hub: This site helps you find apps you might want to use – you can filter by app category, age range(s), subject, and language – and then offers information on how to use the apps.
Chromebooks Can Do That?!: 47-minute webinar. These features can encourage creativity, increase efficiency, ramp up engagement, and support teaching and learning in your classroom.
Control Alt Achieve: Blog, webinars, and extensive resources from educator Eric Curts cover both Google tools and general edtech tools for educators. This is a great resource.
Get the Most Out of Google Meet: New features in Google Meet can save educators time and increase students engagement. In this session we will explore options including breakout rooms, polls, Q&A, translated captions, recording, attendance tracking, live streaming, and more, as well as see new features coming soon to Google Meet. (May 2022)
Gmail Survival Guide for Busy Teachers: If your inbox owns you, it drags you back in time after time without feeling like you’ve accomplished much of anything when you’re done. But if you can tame your email and have it work for you, you have more time for the things that matter most — professionally and personally. (April 2022)
Google Classroom Setup Checklist: One teacher shares their 4-step process for setting up Classroom classes each year.
GoogleAppsPD (text and video): This online course provides professional development for Google Apps in an on demand, as needed, ongoing basis. Online training is delivered via the Internet with instructional videos and texts…. Use this website to learn what you need to know.
Google for Education: Teacher Center: Training on Google apps especially for teachers. Includes Google Classroom materials and Google Educator Certification training.
Google in the Classroom: This was a publicly shared Google Doc updated every week with new tips and best practices for using Classroom with your students. While it was last updated in June 2018, many of the pages are general ideas which are still useful.
How to Create a Class Template in Google Classroom (video): By creating a class template inside Google Classroom, you can save as drafts all the assignments, topics, and materials that you just used this school year and have it ready for the following one.
How to organize your Google Drive as a teacher: This article focuses on organizing your Google Drive for use in Google Classroom or with other learning management systems.
Kaizena: Kaizena is a Google Chrome addon for grading and giving feedback digitally. It allows not only text review but also verbal recording of messages, and linking to other sites, as well as a tagging system.
Richard Byrne: Google Tutorials video: Several hundred short (usually 2-5 minute) video tutorials on Google, Classroom, Drive, Docs, and all sorts of Google tools from Richard Byrne of the ‘Free Technology for Teachers’ blog.
Shake Up Learning: Website and blog with all sorts of tools and tips for teachers using Google applications.
SPARCC Technology Integration: This site offers videos and resources on a number of edtech topics and tools, including a number related to Google.
Teacher’s Tech: Conquer Google Apps video: Playlist with videos ranging from 5 minutes to a half hour long on various Google apps, including Drive, Docs, Keep, Sites, Classroom, and more.
Your Teacher’s Guide to Getting Organized with Google Keep: Keep is a free Google Workspace app that allows you to create, store, organize and search notes. It is both powerful and simple to use making it an ideal note-taking app.

Media Literacy

7 Examples of Media Literacy: Media literacy is the ability to participate in media culture in a productive way. This is considered an important element of education as modern society is flooded with media that has both positive and negative impacts on people’s lives. The following are the basic elements of media literacy.
Center for Media Literacy: CML works to help citizens, especially the young, develop critical thinking and media production skills needed to live fully in the 21st century media culture. The ultimate goal is to make wise choices possible.
Common Sense Media: As a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization, we provide trustworthy information and tools, as well as an independent forum, so that families can have a choice and a voice about the media they consume. Includes numerous reviews of movies, tv shows, games, and other media, and materials for educators.
Crash Course: Media Literacy: A series of short videos explaining what media literacy is, where we need to be aware of media messages, propaganda, and how to apply media literacy knowledge to future technologies.
MediaSmarts: Although aimed primarily at parents and educators, this site has information for anyone interested in issues of media and society. Includes a “Media Issues” section with discussion of issues including violence, stereotying, online hate, and information privacy.
PR Watch: Investigating and exposing public relations spin and propaganda, and by promoting media literacy and citizen journalism, this site includes detailed analysis of advertisements and PR of all sorts.
Project Looksharp: “Project Look Sharp is a media literacy initiative of Ithaca College to provide materials, training and support for the effective integration of media literacy with critical thinking into classroom curricula at all education levels.” Topics include US History, Global Studies, Health, Environment, Psychology, General Media Literacy.
Propaganda Critic: Describes and illustrates techniques and uses of propaganda.
Seeing Isn’t Believing – The Fact Checker’s guide to manipulated video: The Internet is increasingly populated with false and misleading videos. … We have found three main ways video is being altered: footage taken out of context, deceptively edited or deliberately altered… (Washington Post, 2019)
SourceWatch: Propaganda Techniques: Propagandists use a variety of propaganda techniques to influence opinions and to avoid the truth. Often these techniques rely on some element of censorship or manipulation, either omitting significant information or distorting it.
Visual Literacy Today: Visual Literacy Today is an ongoing conversation about visual literacy, a field of study and practice that explores how we see and interpret images, how we use visuals to convey meaning and what it means to be literate in a digital age.
Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers: This … practical guide … supplements generic information literacy with the specific web-based techniques that can get you closer to the truth on the web more quickly. Instead of checklists, this guide emphasizes four moves – strategies which can be used with any source.
What Fact-Checkers Know About Media Literacy—and Students Should, Too: In contrast to typical readers, fact-checkers move laterally rather than vertically, opening multiple browser tabs to validate claims and checking who is behind a site before continuing to read the initial page.

Polls & Quizzes

Tools are free unless otherwise noted.

35 Digital Tools To Create Simple Quizzes And Collect Feedback From Students: A set of links to online tools for creating polls and quizzes. (Dec. 2018)
EasyTestMaker freemium: Free online tool for making various kinds of quizzes which can be published online and graded automatically.
Formative freemium: Use a ‘formative’ from their library or upload your own. See live responses and track student achievement over time. Integrates with Google Classroom.
Go Soap Box: GoSoapBox is a web-based clicker tool used by educators around the world to keep students engaged and gain real-time insight into student comprehension.
Google Forms: A part of Google Drive (aka Google Docs) which allows the creation of polls and quizzes. For more info on how to use Google Forms, see Google Forms for Everything.
Kahoot! freemium: Create quizzes students can play on their mobile devices, or create games you can play for everyone on a screen.
Plickers: Response system where only the teacher needs to have a device; students respond by means of holding up coded cards. Since the cards are individualized, students cannot look and see which answer their classmates chose.
Poll Everywhere freemium: Single-question polling via SMS. The free version does not identify respondents or allow more than 40 responses.
Quiz Star: Use QuizStar to create online quizzes for your students, disseminate quizzes to students, automatically grade quizzes and view the quiz results online.
Quizlet freemium: Site which allows teachers to set up classes and study sets for their students. Note: automatically signs you up for newsletters; can be disabled in settings. Advanced features, including searching other teachers’ materials, available in paid version.
Socrative freemium: Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets.
SurveyMonkey freemium: Popular quiz site which allows you to collect data via weblink, email, Facebook, or embed on your site or blog. The free version offers up to 10 questions per survey with up to 100 respondants.
Wizer.me: Create and share free interactive worksheets with your students online. Join the Wizer community, share your work and explore content made by fellow teachers. Check out the How to Make a Wizer Worksheet video to get started.
Testmoz freemium: Online test generator.
Triventy: Triventy is a game-based learning platform which enables you to author, run and host quizzes and surveys in your classroom. Your students will participate in the quiz using their smartphones – without any prior installation – while you run on a large screen, just like you would run a presentation.

Social Media Tools

7 Dos and Don’ts for Teachers Who Use Social Media: If you use social media and your students do, too, things can get tricky unless you have clearly defined boundaries. Follow these tips to avoid social media faux pas.
Best Free Social Networks / Media Sites for Education: These top social networking/media sites are free, easy to use, and offer rich opportunities for educators and students to network, create, share and learn with each other.
Blendspace: Online posters and presentation tool which allows sharing of images, videos, documents, and webpages in a clean visual format. Includes quizzes and progress tracking. (Formerly ‘TES Teach with Blendspace’)
Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies: The place to find out about social media for working, learning and marketing. Includes a number of free resources and guides.
Chirbit audio: Chirbit is a useful and fun tool that enables you to record,upload and share your voice or audio files easily.
A Comparison of Blogging Services for Teachers and Students: A shared Google Doc created by Richard Byrne to help teachers quickly identify the blogging service that meets their needs.
Ed.VoiceThread $$, audio: A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments. … a secure K-12 network for students and teachers …
Fakebook: ‘Fakebook’ allows teachers and students to create imaginary profile pages for study purposes. Use ‘Fakebook’ to chart the plot of a book, the development of a character, a series of historical events, the debates and relationships between people, and so on!
Glogster for Educators $$: A Glog is an interactive visual platform in which users create a ‘poster or web page’ containing multimedia elements including: text, audio, video, images, graphics, drawings, and data.

LiveBinders: A handy resource for organizing and sharing links in sets of virtual subject-organized ‘binders’. Site includes a public gallery with thousands of education-related Live Binders to browse as well.
Schoology Free/$$: A Learning Management System which offers a Facebook-like interface, allows the creation of classes, calendar, quizzes, word banks, documents, links to other websites, and more.
Twiducate: Twiducate offers a free site where only teachers and students may view classroom posts, thus creating a private network for you and your students and a safer online learning environment.
Vocaroo audio: Basic free service for recording voice messages and sending them via the internet or email.
Web Tools for Teachers, by Type: This LiveBinder is dedicated to helping teachers find the right web tool for the task at hand. Feel free to copy it, share it, leave comments, and if you feel so moved, mark it as ‘useful’.

Video Conferencing

Discord online, mobile, Win, Mac, Linux: Discord is a popular app for gamers and may be familiar to students for that reason. To get started, check out Discord for Teachers – Getting Started Tutorial and How to Use Discord for Your Classroom.
Google Meet up to 250 participants; real-time captions; online, mobile: Google Meet is integrated with Google Classroom and pretty easy to use. To get started with Meet, check out the following: Google Meet 2022 for teachers — Google Meet Cheat Sheet — Google Meet: Important Resources for Teachers and Educators.
Jitsi Meet web, mobile: Jitsi Meet is a fully encrypted, 100% open source video conferencing solution that you can use all day, every day, for free — with no account needed. Free version does not include transcripts. To get started, see How to use Jitsi Meet, an open source Zoom alternative.
Skype up to 99 guests; web, mobile: It’s easy – simply create a meeting link, share the link with participants and join the call. No sign ups required. If you don’t have Skype installed, we will open Skype for you on the Web. Learn more at How to Make a Conference Call With Skype.
Zoom (freemium); online: Zoom is an extremely popular video conferencing platform with a number of options for users. To get started, check out 3 Ways to Level Up Your Zoom Skills and Zoom for Online Teaching Tutorial.

Video Tools for Teachers

See Video Editors for tools to add annotations and subtitles, extract segments or splice segments together, and remove ads.

Animoto (free and paid versions): Animoto is a free classroom tool for educators, students, and administrators. Easily create and share videos with your class, with parents, and beyond. No software downloads required.
Blendspace: Online posters and presentation tool which allows sharing of images, videos, documents, and webpages in a clean visual format. Includes quizzes and progress tracking. (Previously called ‘TES Teach with Blendspace’.)
Classhook (free and paid versions): This freemium service offers clips from popular movies and shows, browsable by topic (and standard, for Premium members).
EdPuzzle ($$): Free tool to choose a video, give it your magic touch and track your students’ comprehension. Also available at the Chrome Web Store.
Flip: Formerly known as “Flipgrid”, Flip allows teachers to pose a question and students to respond in short videos. There are management options for the teacher which allow such things as setting whether the videos are visible to other students and how comments are accepted for.
IPEVO VIsualizer: Free document camera tool.
Loom for Educators: Loom is a video recording and editing tool with free education accounts for teachers.
MoocNote (free and paid versions): MoocNote is a website that enables you to collect and organize online videos from different sources into courses and take notes that are synchronised to videos. Also available at the Chrome Web Store.
PBS Learning Media: Easy, instant access to thousands of classroom-ready, digital resources including videos and interactives perfect for the Interactive Whiteboard, plus audio and photos, and even in-depth lesson plans. You can search, save, and share with ease. Includes the Ken Burns in the Classroom collection.
Timeline.ly: Highlight interesting parts of a video on a timeline with interactive comments, pictures, links, maps, other videos, and more. And share the result with others.
Vialogues: Viialogues allows one or multiple persons to take a video and [a]dd timestamped comments, surveys, and multiple-choice questions to your discussion and then share the product with others.
Vynchronize: Lets you show a YouTube video with a chatbox open next to the video where viewers can talk or ask questions in text.
Watch2Gether (free and paid versions): Watch2Gether lets several people watch a video together over the net and chat at the same time.