The holidays are coming to an end. This means it’s time to get back in routine, ditch the sleepins and late nights and start preparing for class. If you’re looking to spice up the classroom, keep reading. Here are our favourite educational apps or websites to maximise engagement and effort!

Evernote

The older the students, the more the work load. Teachers have to get through more content and often organisation proves to be challenging. Evernote is an online note taking app, suitable for presentations and outside of school study. This web app provides an easy interface to work with and is a great presentation tool for teachers. It provides an organised way to store class notes and it even includes optical character recognition so students can simply take photos of the board! A reminder function is included as well, so deadlines, assignment dates and the like can be documented and Evernote can send you reminders!

Google Classroom

We’ve reached a new decade and times are changing. Almost all schools utilise smart boards, laptops and tablets, and most high school students own a laptop or a PC. This is where Google Classroom comes in. Simply by adding the class to the online classroom through their Google accounts, teachers can send out homework, class notes, and assignments. The class can discuss ideas online and teachers can keep track of assessment marks and how each student is working.

Class Dojo

Class Dojo is essentially a reward system. While the app is perhaps more suitable for primary school, we are sure, some high school students would still appreciate this. Each student is given an avatar and the teacher has the ability to add or deduct points depending on marks and behaviour. Class Dojo will hopefully inspire students to do their best and might even spark some friendly competition!

Kahoot

Kahoot – possibly the most popular out of all our recommendations! Students of all ages can use Kahoot in an enjoyable yet useful way. In essence, Kahoot is used to create interactive quizzes for the whole class. For example, at the end of a topic or unit, teachers can create a Kahoot and each student can join the quiz on their own device and complete it with the class. The quiz questions can be shown on the smart board and the whole class can compete.

Educreations

Theory based classes with heavy content are often difficult to teach in an engaging way. However, Educreations makes life considerably easier in this sense. It is an effective and simple white boarding app that enables teachers to stream prepared content to the board. Especially helpful for the visual learners, Educreations makes it easy for teachers to create short videos and animations as well as annotated diagrams, which aids students in learning theory heavy subjects in an engaging and fun way.