Great Apps for Classroom Use

The phrase “there’s an app for that” fits the classroom schedule perfectly. Almost every project or assignment you can think of can be tied in to using certain apps. There are thousands of apps out there for education, and a quick search will find suitable ones for every school subject. It’s hard to believe that the very first app came out only ten years ago. It was just a simple arcade game app called Snake. The times and technology have changed quickly. Here are a few apps that your kids could make use of immediately.

Calendar Apps

Many schools still use Daily Planner notebooks for students. The student enters the classroom and immediately writes down the assignments for the day in their book bought by the school for about three to four dollars each. Besides being a waste of money for the district, Daily Planners are flawed. Students transcribe the things incorrectly into their books or they don’t do it at all. As a technology teacher and a classroom teacher, I found a way around this. Not only do the students take a picture of the daily assignments on the board, but they also set alarms and notices into their calendar when important assignments or projects are due. Google Calendar or Google Keep are two free options which are easy to use. 

Lecture Apps

Preparing and teaching a crucial part of the curriculum, whether it be a math concept or discussing why the Civil War took place, and then realizing that several students are absent for the day and missed it, is a frustrating but common experience for educators. It’s additional work to find a way to duplicate the lesson for them. However, there are lecture apps that now make it possible for absent students to keep up with the rest of the class. These apps can record the lecture as just audio or audio and video. Then the teacher can easily email it to the missing students or place it up on their website for further use.

Google Docs

If your kids are not using Google Docs on an almost daily basis, then you are doing them a disservice. Not only can they type out their papers or take notes quickly and have them automatically save every time, but they can share their documents if working in a group or simply wanting it to be proofread. Remember all those notebooks we threw out every year once the school year ended? All those things that we wrote in it were wasted. Google Docs will save these documents forever for the student and it will be accessible from any computer and anywhere in the world. Google Slides is a presentation app that should be used almost as much as well. These free apps will change your classroom and how you teach forever.

Teach Learn Lead

As teachers, we can often become a bit redundant in presenting our subjects and lessons. We might do the same thing year after year or cover all novels the exact same way. Getting a little creative boost from someone else is not a bad thing when figuring out attention-grabbing lessons. Teach Learn Lead is sort of like a Facebook for teachers. You can find other educators that teach the same subject or same grade level and share lesson plans and ideas with one another or a whole group.

Epic Unlimited Books for Kids

Creating a classroom library can be an expensive process. Usually, each teacher has hundreds of books on their shelves which students can read during their free time. Epic Unlimited Books for Kids app can help educators expand their library. Any teacher in the United States or Canada receives free access to more than 15,000 books for kids, many of them read aloud as the pictures are displayed on the screen. Most classrooms have a projector, so throwing a book on the screen for the students is an easy task. There are also lesson ideas and videos for many of the books. There are books for all ages like Goosebumps, Big Nate, National Geographic for Kids, wrestling, unexplained mysteries, superheroes, or any other sort of book you may like.  

As always, if you are an educator and unsure about how to proceed with technology usage in the classroom, iAchieve can help. Technology workshops can be scheduled at your school to help further your tech skills. Remember that you are not the only educator that might feel a bit lost, so speaking up will help others as well.  

Written by Ryan Crawley

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