A Highly Subjective List: Top Five Tech Tools for 2014-2015


I had a request from a teacher to do a post about the top five new tech tools that are spreading around these days. Here's my highly subjective list. If you have any tools you'd like to add, please comment and I'll build them into a new post.


5. Kaizena

A Google Apps add-on that allows you to make voice comments on Google Docs.

4. Flubaroo

A Google Sheets add-on that auto-grades multiple choice tests.  It also auto-emails grades back to students.

3. Canva

A super design tool that makes GREAT LOOKING images of all kinds:  business cards, posters, menus. Very flexible. I see this as being a much easier tool to use for infographics than Piktochart.

2. Padlet

An online bulletin board. Users generate the bulletin board, pose a question and anyone can post to it if they have the URL. Possible use: in small groups, one person starts a board, and everyone contribute thoughts, comments, media. The group analyzes the posts and groups them into themes. The owner of the board can move posts around.

1.5  Educanon/Zaption

Tons of online video editing apps have been coming out lately. I think this is because the new programming language HTML5 gives the web this capability. Educanon and Zaption (Boris Korsunsky alerted faculty to Zaption last year) are geared towards teachers editing video for classroom use--inserting questions, pauses for conversation, etc.

YouTube also has a simple online video editor. It lets you insert music, cut, insert transitions and text. You don't need iMovie anymore to make simple videos, that's for sure.

1. Thinglink

There's no special reason why this is number 1. I don't know if it's the best. But I think it's interesting because it lets you insert links into images. You can take a historic photo from an archive and annotate it with video, note, and links. Students can annotate images and post them on a Padlet to share them--that's called app-smashing :).

Here's one I made:




Oh, I almost forgot: 10 minutes ago I just found out about this very cool tool called Rocketboard that uses your smartphone camera to scan your whiteboard, pluck you out of the picture, and share your whiteboard as it progresses with remote users.

BYOT 2014 Symbaloo

During our BYOT session this summer Mary and I shared a bunch of good new tech tools which teachers. You can browse them yourself on the Symbaloo we made (Symbaloo is another excellent tool which lets you gather and share "webmixes," collections of online resources on a topic.)


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