Favorite Apps
Don't see the app you're looking for? Email Caitlin Fowler and we'll add it.
Presentation & product creation Apps
Great for easy collaboration and sharing. Free, easy to use and share. Can also easily convert PowerPoints to Slides. Can export as Powerpoint.
Original image creation. Free, fairly easy to use. Drawings can be inserted into any Google app.
A digital bulletin board app which can be used multiple ways in a classroom. Give an assignment to have each kid create their own board collecting content for a specific topic, or assign kids to post to a single board in order to share information. Works great as an exit-ticket activity, too. Can post text, images and even videos.
Cloud-based and free. Great for showing idea flow because of zoom-transition feature.
Want to teach kids how to create presentations driven by visuals, not copied and pasted text? Free and cloud-based, Haiku Deck is easy to use and limits the number of words students can put on slides.
Helps student turn an image into a learning exploration. Students (or teachers) add 'targets' to an image so when someone hovers over the target, then get links, text, images and videos to expand or explain that part of the image for a multidimensional digital annotation experience.
Animation presentation software. Uses animation and voiceover for a great alternative to stand up presentations. Cloud-based, free and easy to use and share.
Students can digitally interact with teacher-led presentations using iPads or iPhones. Can embed elements like a quiz, poll, or drawing response -- viewers participate in real-time, but also at their own pace.
Make professional quality infographics that students can print, share digitally and also play as slideshows. Awesome product alternative to help kids visualize information. Use it as a teacher or assign infographic creations as a project.
Speak loudly. Speak visually. This is the tagline for Visme, another infographic generator. Also free, collaborative easy to use and share.
Looking for new and hip slideshow templates. Check out Slides Carnival for free PowerPoint and Slides templates. Sick of looking at the same template in student presentations? Show them Slides Carnival -- they'll love it.
Looking for beautiful photographs that are free to use and share? Unsplash is a HUGE library, filled with free, professional photographs. The archive is curated, categorized and easy to search.
Quizzing and Interactive Classroom Apps
Its free and all students at OPHS have access to this powerful, yet intuitive program. Use it to make surveys, quizzes or as digital worksheets. An easy way to collect information that is transformed into a spreadsheet in one click.
Awesome video discussion platform. Ask a question and students respond through video. They can also watch each other's response and dialogue via video. Simple. Interactive, and tons of fun.
GoFormative is a quick, on-the-spot app that teachers can use to assess students. Post a question and ask them to respond with words, a picture or with a video. It has grid and graph paper, short answer and multiple-choice.
Turn any review into an interactive game and let kids create and share games too. As usual, free, customizable and easy to use.
Organization Apps
Simply put, Classroom is an easy way to share content with students digitally. Use it to create a 100% paper free classroom -- both assigning and collecting digital work, or only use it as a way to share digital content such as links to websites, PDFs or quizzes. Once you enter an assignment you never have to enter it again as Classroom lets you pull from previous years. Last year I saved 6 trees worth of paper and countless hours in the copy room.
Great way to use kid's cell phones as a tool for organization and communication. They simply sign up to your remind and you plug in due dates and enter messages. Kids get a text reminding them what they need to do or what is due. Simple and does not require sharing sensitive info such as phone numbers.
If you need to organize large projects of lots of kids, this is a MUST have. On a personal note, the Talon would not run without Trello. Based on a practice used in mass manufacturing, teachers create 'cards' that are moved based on the steps in a process. Kids can upload documents, images, video and sound files as well as message each other without sharing cell phone numbers. Powerful, free and easy to use.