These days, many people, including teachers, collaborate and communicate with others far away.  Some teachers even work remotely!

Whether we are collaborating with colleagues at other schools, we are joining a webinar about a pertinent topic, or we simply want to communicate with our school stakeholders, we need to utilize technology.

Here are four free tech tools that I use in my classroom on a daily basis that I think will help you improve your teaching practice:

1. Remind

Remind is a communication platform which I use constantly.  It is a web based app as well as a phone app and it is used to send individual messages, group messages, and class announcements. The best thing about it is that it mimics text messaging, so students and parents can simply reply to your texts and communicate with you immediately.

What you need to know:

• You can create multiple classrooms, so you can message each prep separately.
• You can print out records of communication
• You can download their free app and always be accessible (downside: you’re always accessible! Set office hours and stick to them)
• All you need is your students’ and parents’ phone numbers. Don’t worry, they can’t find yours!

2.  Google Classroom

Google Classroom is an incredible tool. All of the Google Apps for Education work seamlessly with Google Classroom to make homework, grading, and student collaboration extremely easy.

What you need to know:

• You need a gmail account
• You can create assignments, announcements, pose questions, and attach google documents, forms, sheets, and slides to each.
• You can give your students a class code to make accessing the classroom for the first time extremely simple.
• You can use Google Forms and Google Sheets to create quizzes.
• You can search for videos on youtube directly on Google Classroom and share them as assignments.

3.  Common Curriculum

Common Curriculum is a lesson planning website that I have found to be invaluable to me as a teacher with multiple preps. I am able to set up my schedule, move lessons forward or backward, post parts of the lessons online for students, parents, and colleagues to view, and attach documents and other tools that I may need access to during a lesson.

What you need to know:

• Common Curriculum is free and lesson plans are easily shareable.
• There are several templates that you can use to organize and plan your lessons.
• There is a comprehensive list of standards that you can tag for your lessons on a daily basis. These include state standards, common core standards, and many more.
• You can print out your lessons easily, but wherever you have internet, you will have access to your lessons. It makes lesson planning possible in most situations and at most times.

4. Nearpod

Nearpod is a website where you can create interactive presentations that play on all students’ devices.  I use Nearpod all the time. Nearpod includes features like Collaboration boards, games, virtual tours, and even pre-made lessons to use and modify.

What you need to know:

• The free version is pretty limited. You will start using it and love it, but then you will see all the features that you can’t access unless you pay for a membership, which is not cheap.
• You need to make sure the students name themselves correctly so that you can grade their work later. Trust me, you don’t want to be looking at the results after school only to find that you’re going to need to know which student “FunkyFresh225” is.
• Even though Nearpod is expensive to pay for out of pocket, it is definitely worth it because you’ll be able to create self-paced lessons, make more interactive presentations and access features to created immersive and interactive lessons.

These are four essential tech tools for me and I use them on a daily basis. I hope that you find these helpful. Please share what tech tools you use in your classroom in the comments!

Class dismissed!