Tools for Teachers: Classroom Webtools

Biblionasium is a social reading community for kids, their friends, Educators, and parents.

Bookopolis is a social network and book discovery tool for young children. Think of this as similar to Shelfari or GoodReads for children. Teachers create a private class where their students earn points, write book reviews, and build personal reading communities. There are various tools for teachers to use to track reading progress. Grades: 2nd-8th

Using flipgrid, students can share and comment on short videos made by other users. You can set up classes and students could share short reading passages, make video comments on texts, or have other non-synchronous conversations in a format where they can see and hear each other.

Hstry is a multimedia timeline creation tool that will work on your laptop, Chromebook, iPad or tablet. Students can interact and comment on peer timelines. Use a variety of media to highlight important biographical, historical, or literary events in chronological order. Add in video, images, audio, and text to the events these engaging timeline. Grades: 3-12

Loom is a fairly new, and free, resource that records your screen and camera. It’s especially useful for creating short videos, introducing a topic, or providing instructions, clarifications, or tutorials.

Use Moovly to take lessons, tutorials or presentations to the next level and increase student creativity and involvement. Combine visuals, sounds, voice and video in clear explanations or engaging stories.

My Storybook is a website and app where young people can create their own stories. Take a writing lesson, build your own storybook, keep and share your stories, it’s all here in My Storybook. No sign up necessary if you want to create a story. Just click Try Now and start creating. Sign up to save and share stories. Use drawings, text, scenes and more to create stories. A great, creative tool for digital storytelling. Grades: K-6

Online custom poster and photo collage maker.

This site allows for the creation of web-based presentations that include animated videos and amazing content. Powtoon is ideal for those seeking a nice alternative to more traditional presentation tools. Simple to use, it makes creating engaging, interesting, and exciting animated videos extremely easy. Users can create and show presentations straight from the Powtoon site, or opt for the export to Youtube option, or even download a MP4 video format for use offline. Grades: K-12

Not only does SafeShare.TV remove distracting and offensive elements around YouTube videos, but it also allows you to crop videos before sharing them.

Use our world famous recorder to record on-screen activity for short tutorials, visual presentations, and communicate while you demonstrate!

ThingLink is an interactive media platform that empowers publishers, educators, brands, and bloggers to create more engaging content by adding rich media links to photos and videos. Use ThingLink to create interactive news photography, maps, posters, family albums, and infographics in minutes!

PBS's Building Big is dedicated to the physics and science around building strong and efficient structures. On this site, your child or student will learn all about engineers and their role in building cities; internal and external forces; strong materials used for constructing different structures; and strong shapes used in building domes, dams, buildings, and bridges. The resource includes interactive labs – where students test various shapes and materials, as well as engaging games, which have students testing their design skills.

Design Squad by PBS is filled with experiments and projects to try and fun videos to watch! We particularly love the interactive Design Process that helps students understand what happens at each point, and provides tips to help them build their engineering skills.

Edheads is an online educational resource that provides free science and math games and activities that promote critical thinking. Choose from Simple Machines, Virtual Knee Surgery or Stem Cell Heart Repair, among others. All activities meet state and national standards.

Engineering is Elementary uses children’s love for building things to engage them in real-world engineering design challenges. The hands-on projects integrate an elementary school science topic with a specific field of engineering. Projects combine science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to encourage problem-solving, inquiry, and innovation. Grades: 1-8

Molecular Workbench is a free, open source environment providing visual, interactive computational experiments for teaching and learning science. Even though there are many simulations ready for use in the classroom, teachers can also create simulations based on their specific curricular needs and share them with other teachers. Grades: 9-12.

National Geographic Education is famous for their educational resources, especially relating to the environment and different cultures. Did you know they have some great engineering resources too?

PhET provides fun, free, interactive, research-based science and mathematics simulations. We extensively test and evaluate each simulation to ensure educational effectiveness. These tests include student interviews and observation of simulation use in classrooms. The simulations are written in Java, Flash or HTML5, and can be run online or downloaded to your computer. All simulations are open source (see our source code). Multiple sponsors support the PhET project, enabling these resources to be free to all students and teachers.

Teach hands-on projects integrated with Tinkercad and Circuits, the Web’s most popular, easy-to-use online apps for makers.

Tryengineering.org is a resource for students, their parents, their teachers and their school counselors. We provide hands-on experiments and activities, referrals to summer programs and internship opportunities, and search tools for schools that offer engineering programs.

A list from the American Association of School Librarians

Newsela publishes daily news articles at 5 reading levels from grades 2 – 12, making it easy for an entire class to read the same content, but at a level that’s just right for each student.

Breakout EDU is the immersive learning games platform that brings the escape room to your classroom.