The covid-19 pandemic has brought many pros and cons along with it. This pandemic has totally changed the working system of the Indian education sector. Schools these days make use of technology more than ever before. At the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic, many schools and teachers had to take creative measures to keep the learning process active. They started using many Digital Apps in the classroom for their online teaching. But the use of these Apps has not reduced even when the School started offline. Hundreds of Apps are in the market which is catering to the needs of Teachers. Teachers can use these in the classroom for creating engaging and interactive classes, using this app they can take the students on an online virtual tour, they can share different kinds of learning resources, can gamify the quizzes, or even can use them for grading.

upEducators – A Google for Educators Partner Company – has trained 5000+ Educators on various Digital Apps. Based on the recommendations of hundreds of teachers and Digital Pedagogy Experts, we have listed the Apps which Teachers can use in the classroom. To help you to make an informed decision we have also given the number of downloads of those apps, their Reviews and other details.

• Nearpod

Nearpod offers multiple solutions in a single tech platform. This app proves ideal for interactive lessons and is made especially for teachers. Read on to learn why Nearpod is the go-to and only ed-tech tool for millions of teachers around the world.

A “cool” presentation is no longer enough. Nearpod goes beyond presentation. Nearpod app is completely free and offers different layouts, which make it suitable for various teaching activities. All the teachers have been using PowerPoint presentations or google slides, but want to make the presentation more interactive by adding the quiz in between or adding the 3D content or Virtual tour in between the slides, then here comes the Nearpod.

6 ways to use Nearpod in the classroom: 

1. You can use Nearpod as a substitute for other presentation tools. You can even ‘drag and drop your existing Google slides, PDFs, and PowerPoints into the app for it to instantly create a Nearpod presentation.
2. It gives students opportunities for interaction and immediate feedback by having them draw on a map or diagram.
3. Using the app to distribute resources is another simple way of using it in the classroom.
4. As a teacher, you can create customized Quizzes, Polls, Open-ended Questions, Matching Pairs, and more that can be used to check for students’ understanding in real-time.
5. Students can also respond to a poll question, post a note or image to a collaboration board, take a multiple-choice quiz, or participate in a gamified Time to Climb challenge.
6. You can take students on a virtual field trip to a national park or a different country.
   

Useful stats of Nearpod:

• Google Classroom

For teachers and students, the education-friendly platform Google Classroom brings the benefits of paperless sharing, assessment, and digital collaboration to classrooms. Tens of millions of teachers and students use Google Classroom in thousands of schools worldwide, making it one of the most popular EdTech tools around.

Because it’s a fairly flexible platform, educators use its features in a lot of different ways. With Google Classroom, teachers can:

• Streamline how they manage classes.
• Digitally organize, distribute, and collect assignments, course materials (videos, websites, PDFs, and more), and student work.
• Communicate with students about their classwork.
• Give students timely feedback on their assignments and assessments.

Useful stats of Google Classroom:

• Flipgrid

The video-sharing tool Flipgrid, as we all know, is popular in schools—so popular, in so many countries, that its rapid rise has been attributed to “Flipgrid Fever.” The tool has been free for educators to use for over a year now after being acquired by Microsoft.

One of the Teachers from a renowned school in Pune shared her experience “It is a great tool to get to know your students. You create a topic with questions and the students record a video to answer the questions. The time limit is 5 minutes. The students can comment, like, or reply using a video. Last year, with remote learning or in-person learning, FlipGrid was a really powerful way to have students respond to a lab, or prompt or demonstrate one of Newton’s Laws of Motion. I, as their teacher, can even provide video feedback to them. Assigning students homework with a FlipGrid to record responses or demonstrate science concepts will reinforce their learning. I can’t wait to use it again this school year!”

The popular tool has features that teachers in any subject can use to help students connect with each other and share their learning.

Useful stats of Flipgrid:

• Kahoot

The gamification approach in teaching and learning is considered one of the new methods that are capable of raising students’ achievement.

Making learning fun and engaging through quizzes and games has always been a challenging task for teachers worldwide. A similar kind of quiz activity becomes boring and monotonous for today’s hi-tech students. One of the most effective ways to do just so is by creating games for the students to play. But let’s face it: as much as it is hard to constantly come up with new games for your class, the greater challenge is actually making them get fully involved in it. And the worst thing to do as an educator is to force the kids to participate on your terms – doing that just defeats the whole purpose.

The constant rise of technology directly adds up to this dilemma because students are growing to be more tech-savvy, even at an early age, more than ever. Students love gamification as most of them spend a lot of time on online games. So, how cool it will be if you get a tool which can help you gamify the quiz. Luckily, there’s Kahoot.

Teachers love quizzing students and students love gaming. What would happen if these two activities could be merged? Kahoot provides the option to gamify the quizzes which helps teachers with quizzing in an intriguing way for the students.

We can use this pervasive and engaging gaming phenomenon to redesign and supercharge blended learning in teaching:

• Students love playing Kahoot!. This free platform allows teachers to create multiple-choice questions that players answer on their own devices. Gamify your classroom to boost engagement, collaboration and learning in remote, hybrid, and in-person learning environments.
• Kahoot! has more than a half-million Preloaded questions. Teachers can choose from these quizzes already shared on these sites or create content-specific questions to use as pre-assessments or quizzes.
• ‘The ghost mode’ feature in which a student plays against the “ghost” of their previous quiz result, essentially competing against themselves to make improvements.
• Kahoot! allows you to mix the style of questions in a quiz, which is a great way to make it more engaging.
• Improve each student’s understanding by using the analytics of results.
• Add in videos right from YouTube very easily.

Useful stats of Kahoot:

• Quizlet

Quizlet is another quiz app like Quizizz, Kahoot, and Gimkit but it also has other tools built in. At its most basic, Quizlet is a digital pop-quiz database. It features more than 300 million study sets, each one is like a deck of flashcards. It’s also interactive, with the ability to create your own study set, or clone and edit those of others. It is free for the basic model and very affordable for the entire year for a teacher account.

Quizlet is broken down into several styles, including:

• Flashcards that are pretty self-explanatory, like real ones, with a question on one side and the answer on the other.
• Learn puts questions and answers into multiple choice-style quizzes that can be completed to get an overall result. This applies to images, too.
• Spell will speak aloud a word and the student is then required to type out the spelling of it.
• Test is an auto-generated mix of questions with written, multiple-choice, and true-or-false answer options. 
• Match has you pairing up correct words or a mix of words and images.
• Gravity is a game that has asteroids with words coming at a planet you need to protect by typing out the words before they hit.
• Live is a game mode that allows for multiple students to work collaboratively.

Useful stats of Quizlet:

• Book Creator

It is a free tool that allows users to create multimedia ebooks. Education is changing. Bring creativity to your classroom with Book Creator, the one app you need for any subject or grade level. Combine text, images, audio, and video to create: Interactive stories, Digital portfolios, Research journals, Poetry books, Science reports, Instruction manuals, ‘About me’ books, Comic adventures and many more things.
Well, the team at Book Creator has released a brand new feature that lets students collaborate with their peers to create a book together! As an educator, we want our students to be collaborators—to know how to communicate effectively, compromise, and work together to demonstrate their understanding.

Useful stats of Book Creator:

• Class Dojo

Class Dojo is like Facebook for classrooms. Teachers can create portfolios for each student using the Class Dojo platform. Students can upload pictures, videos and assignments. But that’s not all. Class Dojo even allows parents to be a part of the classroom activities. Parents can use Class Dojo to get regular updates about the classroom activities in the form of photos and videos. Teachers can also use the messaging feature to share updates with parents personally or via a group. The application can translate the messages into 30+ languages and parents can join the classroom using any device.

Useful stats of Class Dojo:

• Google Earth

Teachers can use Google Earth as a supplement to all kinds of lessons, bringing the geography and topography of different locations to life. Students can perform searches, zoom around the Earth, study layers of weather, and study eye-level photos.

How to use Google Earth effectively is the key here. Enhance the teaching experience with Google Earth tours and more using this guide.

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Some specific classroom ideas:

• Use the Voyager option, to access high-quality educational material tied to locations around the globe and across time. 
• Use the Feeling Lucky option to visit a random destination, and create a lesson plan around that location.
• Use the measuring capabilities to have your students plan trips, compare distances, and calculate the height of mountains.
• Use Street View to walk down the street in a foreign city, retracing the footsteps of a historical figure.
• Search for the location that your class is covering in a lesson, and view photos from that area.
• Upload your own map files to customize a lesson of your own.

Useful stats of Google Earth:

• Google Docs

While most of us have been using Word for decades to draft everything from school essays to resumes to important work documents, Google Docs’ web-based platform is a total game-changer for editing and sharing documents in the connected age. Whether working in the physical classroom or teaching remotely, Google Docs is a great way to share information without papers.

Here are some interesting ways to introduce this technology and keep students motivated and interested in the classroom.

• You can collaborate with students and colleagues to work together on the same document. 
• Use revision history to track document changes and revert to any previous version of the document. 
• The documents autosave in real-time.
• With a simple link you can easily access the data and pass the link to anyone you want to share your content with.
• You can export to a variety of formats (even Microsoft Word and PDF).
• No software is required to use Google Docs.
• Keep a running record of staff meeting notes.
• Set up a peer review system by giving students responsibility for providing feedback on another student’s work by ‘Suggesting’ changes and leaving comments in Docs.
• Multiple sharing settings allow you to publish student work by other people, or by making it public on the web.
• As an added bonus, you can Liven up your assignments with visuals and graphics

Useful stats of Google Docs:

• Google Jamboard

Whiteboards and chalkboards have been a fixture in classrooms for ages. But there are drawbacks… If you too agree, you’ve got to check out Google’s Jamboard app.

The Jamboard app is a fantastic tool for virtual/remote learning. It’s really easy to collaborate. Plus, it’s very visual.

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Students can interact in jams in lots of ways:

• A really useful tool is frame boxes, which allow you or students to highlight sections of text or numbers.
• A great way to engage students in live work so you can see their thought processes is by using annotations.
• Jamboard is great for brainstorming — gathering ideas, sorting them by colour, organizing them on different frames, moving them together, drawing lines to connect important ideas, etc.
• Jamboard gives you access to TONS of images (digital posters). Plus, students can always collaborate and share each other’s posters.
• A fun part about learning something new is guessing. Can I guess the right answer? Can I figure it out on my own? This circle and guess activity can be engaging — and get students thinking deeply.
• Using Jamboard as a Teaching whiteboard has lots of benefits. For remote learning, it’s a whiteboard you can share on your screen during a video call.
• Storytelling – This one’s fun! It has so many possibilities. You can add images and have students tell stories about them. Or you can do an add and pass activity, where each student adds a slide with an image and some text to the story.
• Have students do screen recordings of their jams with a tool like Screencastify. They can describe what they’ve done, show us how they do it, and tell us why.
• Graphic organizers give students a space to think. They can walk students through a line of thinking. They can help them get their ideas in order. Create graphic organizers in Jamboard and students will be able to draw, write, and move items around.
• Give students a situation and let them debate the pros and cons. They can do this on their own individual frames in a jam or all together on one big frame in Jamboard.

Useful stats of Google Jamboard: