Best Apps and Tools for Teachers (2026, Verified Live)

Every tool below was checked as live in August 2026 — which matters more than it sounds, because this category turns over fast. Microsoft retired Flip, the tool formerly known as Flipgrid, in September 2024. Quizizz has renamed itself Wayground. Several apps that appear on almost every “best apps for teachers” list have quietly delisted from the app stores or gone dark entirely. There is a section at the end covering those, because you will still see them recommended.

Updated August 2026. Every link and product status on this page was verified live.

Classroom management and communication

These are the tools that handle the administrative spine of a class: who is in it, what has been set, and how you reach students and families.

Google Classroom — the default if your school uses Google

Assignment distribution, collection, grading and announcements in one place, tied to Google Docs, Drive and Meet. Its strongest argument is not its feature list but the fact that it is already included in Google Workspace for Education, so there is no procurement conversation and no extra student account to create.

If your school runs Google, start here and only add other tools where Classroom genuinely falls short. If your school runs Microsoft, the equivalent argument applies to Teams for Education.

ClassDojo — behaviour and family communication, mainly primary

ClassDojo is built around sharing classroom moments and behaviour feedback with parents, and it is strongest in elementary and primary settings. Teachers use it to post photos and updates to a class story and to message families directly, including translated messages.

The thing to think through before adopting it is the behaviour-points model. Publicly visible point systems suit some classrooms and are a poor fit for others, and it is worth deciding your approach to that deliberately rather than inheriting the app’s defaults.

Remind — messaging without sharing phone numbers

Remind exists to solve one specific problem: contacting students and parents without either side handing over a personal phone number. Messages can go to a whole class, a group or an individual, and it keeps a record.

That record is the underrated part. Having a logged, school-sanctioned channel protects both you and the student, which is exactly why messaging families from a personal number is a bad habit.

Seesaw — digital portfolios for younger learners

Seesaw is built around students capturing and submitting their own work — photos, drawings, voice recordings, video — into a portfolio that families can see. It fits early years and elementary far better than secondary, and it is the most natural fit where students cannot yet type fluently.

Teaching, assessment and engagement

Tools for the live part of the lesson: checking understanding, keeping attention, and finding out what students actually absorbed.

Kahoot! — game-based quizzing

The best-known tool in this category and still the most reliable for energy in the room. Students answer on their own devices while questions display on the shared screen. It is excellent for review and recall and genuinely popular with students.

Use it knowing what it is: the speed-scoring rewards quick recall, which makes it a good revision and warm-up tool and a poor instrument for assessing considered thinking.

Wayground — formerly Quizizz

Note the name change. Quizizz rebranded to Wayground, and older guides still list it under the old name — the old address now redirects. It covers similar ground to Kahoot! but leans more toward self-paced work: students can move through a quiz individually, which makes it more usable for homework and revision as well as live play.

Nearpod — turning a slide deck into an interactive lesson

Nearpod lets you build a lesson where the slides are on students’ devices as well as the board, with polls, quizzes, open-ended questions, drawing and collaborative boards embedded in the flow. It supports both live teacher-paced sessions and self-paced assignments.

Its practical strength is that it gives you visibility of every student’s response rather than the three who put their hands up, which is genuinely difficult to achieve otherwise in a full class.

Pear Deck — the same idea, inside your existing slides

Pear Deck adds interactive questions to Google Slides and PowerPoint decks you already have. If you have years of slides you do not want to rebuild in another platform, that is the deciding difference between it and Nearpod.

Socrative — quick formative checks

Socrative is deliberately lighter than the tools above: quick quizzes, exit tickets and instant polls with results you can see immediately. There are separate teacher and student apps. It is the right tool when you want a two-minute check for understanding rather than a whole interactive lesson.

EdPuzzle — questions embedded in video

EdPuzzle lets you take a video, trim it, and embed questions at chosen points so students must engage as they watch rather than letting it play. It also reports who watched what.

This is the standard answer to the flipped-classroom problem of not knowing whether the video was watched, and it is equally useful for setting cover work.

Mentimeter — live polls and word clouds

Mentimeter is aimed at presentations rather than schools specifically, which makes it a good fit for older students, staff training and parent sessions. Live word clouds are a genuinely effective way to surface a whole group’s prior knowledge or misconceptions in seconds.

Creating and curating materials

Canva for Education — the most useful single addition for most teachers

Canva’s education offering covers worksheets, presentations, posters, infographics, certificates and video, with a large template library. For teachers without design training it removes most of the friction from producing materials that look professional, and it is the tool most likely to save you real time each week.

Book Creator — students making books

Book Creator lets students combine text, images, audio and drawing into a finished digital book. It works across a wide age range and is a good vehicle for evidencing understanding in a form students take pride in — particularly effective for early literacy and for project write-ups.

Padlet — shared boards

A Padlet is a collaborative wall where students post notes, links, images or recordings. It is the fastest way to collect contributions from a whole class at once, and useful for brainstorming, exit tickets and gathering questions anonymously.

Wakelet — curating collections

Wakelet organises links, documents, videos and notes into shareable collections. It is the tidiest answer to “here are the twelve resources for this topic” without emailing a wall of URLs.

ThingLink — interactive images

ThingLink turns an image, diagram or 360-degree photo into an interactive surface with clickable hotspots containing text, audio, video or links. It suits labelled diagrams, virtual tours and anything where the spatial layout carries meaning.

Storybird — illustrated writing

Storybird pairs student writing with professional artwork to produce illustrated stories, which is a strong prompt for reluctant writers. Note: it is now effectively a web tool — the Android app has been delisted — so plan on students using it in a browser.

CK-12 — free open textbooks and practice

CK-12 provides free, openly licensed “FlexBooks” and adaptive practice, concentrated in maths and science. Its value is straightforward: it is free, it is aligned to standards, and you can adapt the books rather than take them as given. For a department without a budget it is one of the most substantial resources available.

PrintFriendly — clean printing and PDF tidying

PrintFriendly strips ads, navigation and clutter from a web page before printing or saving it as a PDF, and lets you delete individual sections first. It has since expanded into a broader set of PDF tools — converting, merging, splitting and compressing. Modest, but it solves the recurring irritation of a worksheet that prints as nine pages of navigation.

Productivity and organisation

Trello — visible task management

Trello organises work into boards, lists and cards. Teachers use it for personal planning, for coordinating a department, and with older students for managing group projects — the visible board makes it obvious who is doing what and what has stalled.

Slack — team communication

Slack is a general workplace messaging tool rather than an education product, and it belongs in the staff and department column rather than the student one. Where a school already uses Microsoft Teams or Google Chat, use that instead — adding a third messaging system is usually a step backwards.

Accessibility and multilingual classrooms

Tool lists usually treat accessibility as a separate topic, which is backwards — the features that help a student with a reading difficulty or a student still learning the language of instruction are the same features that make a tool usable for everyone else. It is worth checking these before adopting anything, because retrofitting is much harder than choosing well.

What to look for when you evaluate a tool:

• Text-to-speech and read-aloud. Can a student have on-screen text read to them without leaving the tool or installing something extra? Both Google and Microsoft build reading support into their education platforms, which is another argument for using what your school already licenses.
• Live captions and transcripts. Essential for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, and quietly valuable for everyone — students revising from a transcript, or following a lesson in a noisy home. If your meeting platform offers captions, turn them on by default rather than on request, so no student has to ask.
• Translation. Family-communication tools increasingly translate messages automatically, which is the difference between a parent receiving your update and not. Where a tool does not translate, a school-approved translation route matters more than another classroom app.
• Keyboard navigation and screen-reader support. Test it in five minutes: try to complete a task using only the keyboard. Tools that fail this also tend to fail for students using assistive technology.
• Contrast and text sizing. Check whether the interface survives being zoomed and whether colour alone is used to convey meaning — a common problem in game-style quiz tools, where answers are distinguished by colour and shape.
• A non-timed mode. Speed-scored quiz tools disadvantage students with processing differences and students working in an additional language. Where a tool offers an untimed or self-paced option, knowing it exists before the lesson is worth more than discovering it afterwards.

One practical rule: if a tool cannot be used by every student in the class, it is not a whole-class tool. Use it as an optional extra rather than the route through which the lesson’s core content is delivered.

Rolling out a new tool without losing a fortnight

The reason most classroom tools fail is not the tool. It is the rollout — introducing three at once, in a lesson that also has content to cover, without a fallback.

• Introduce it on content students already know. The first use should have no new subject material in it. If the lesson is doing two new things at once, you cannot tell which one failed.
• Do the student journey yourself, on a student account. Teacher and student views differ, and a step that is obvious from the dashboard is often invisible from the other side. This catches most first-lesson problems.
• Have a paper fallback for the first run. Networks fail, logins fail, and a lesson that collapses without the tool teaches students that the tool is a risk.
• Give it three lessons before judging. Almost anything feels worse than the status quo the first time. Decide in advance what “working” would look like — more students responding, less time marking, better questions — so the judgement is not just about how the first lesson felt.
• Tell families once, in advance, if students will use it at home. A short note explaining what the tool is and why prevents most of the questions and all of the surprise.
• Write down where your materials live. If you build a term of lessons in a platform, record how to export them. This is the habit that would have saved a great deal of work when Flip closed.

Tools you will still see recommended that have shut down or changed

Edtech tools disappear quietly. These all still appear on current-looking “best apps for teachers” lists, and each was checked in August 2026.

The pattern is worth internalising: an edtech tool can be free, widely recommended and still gone in eighteen months, usually because it was acquired or because a free product had no route to sustainability. That is not an argument against using free tools — it is an argument for the exit test below.

How to choose a teaching tool (and avoid the next shutdown)

There are thousands of these tools and almost all of them will show you a feature list. These are the questions that actually decide whether a tool is worth adopting.

• Does your school already pay for something that does this? The first question, and the one most often skipped. If you have Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, a large share of what these tools do is already licensed, already approved and already covered by your school’s data agreements.
• Does it require student accounts — and is that cleared? Anything where students log in and submit work processes personal data about children. In the US that engages FERPA, and COPPA for under-13s; in the UK and EU, UK GDPR and GDPR. This is normally a school-level decision, not an individual teacher’s. Ask before you roll it out to a class.
• What happens to your materials if it disappears? The Flip shutdown is the cautionary case: content became view-only, then was deleted. Before you invest a term of work in a platform, find out whether you can export it. If there is no export, treat the platform as disposable and keep your masters elsewhere.
• What does the free tier actually include? Free plans in this category are usually capped — on students per class, saved lessons, or a feature you will want by week three. Check the cap before building a routine around it.
• Does it work on the devices your students actually have? A tool that needs an app is a poor fit for a school running Chromebooks or a class relying on phones. Browser-based is the safer default.
• Can it be used without an account by students? Tools where students join with a code rather than an account — Kahoot!, Mentimeter, Padlet in some configurations — are far simpler to clear and far quicker to start.
• Are you adding a tool or replacing one? The most common failure is accumulation. Every additional platform is another login, another place work can hide and another thing to explain to a parent. Adopt one at a time, and drop something when you add something.

What this list deliberately leaves out

Two categories are missing on purpose.

AI writing detectors. These are marketed hard to schools and they are not in this list because their reliability is contested and the consequences of a false positive fall on a student who did nothing wrong. If your school is weighing one, treat the vendor’s accuracy claim as a claim rather than a finding, and make sure there is a process for a student to contest a result.

AI lesson-planning and marking assistants. This category is changing month to month, so any specific recommendation would be stale before the school year ends. The durable advice is the same as for any tool: check what your school already licenses, confirm whether student work is being sent to a third party before you paste it in, and never let a generated grade go to a student without reading the work yourself.

Frequently asked questions

What apps do online teachers actually need?

Fewer than most lists suggest. In practice: one place to set and collect work and communicate with the class, one tool for live engagement or checking understanding, and one for making materials. Start with what your school already licenses, then add a single tool at a time where there is a real gap.

Are these apps free for teachers?

Most have a free tier, and several are entirely free — CK-12 and Google Classroom among them. Free tiers are usually capped on class size, saved content or particular features, so check the specific limit before you design a routine around it. Many vendors also offer school or district pricing that is far better value than individual subscriptions.

Is it safe to ask students to sign up for an app?

Treat it as a school decision rather than a personal one. Any tool where students create accounts and submit work is processing children’s personal data, which engages FERPA and COPPA in the US and GDPR in the UK and EU. Your school or district will normally have an approval process and existing data agreements. Where you want to move quickly, prefer tools students can join with a code and no account.

What happened to Flipgrid?

Microsoft renamed Flipgrid to Flip and then retired it. It went view-only on 1 July 2024 and was fully retired on 30 September 2024, with remaining content deleted afterwards. Core video-response features moved into Teams for Education.

Is Quizizz gone?

No — it has been renamed Wayground, and the old address redirects to the new one. If a guide still calls it Quizizz, that tells you when the guide was written.

How many teaching tools should I actually use?

Fewer than you are probably being encouraged to. Each additional platform adds a login for students, another place work can be lost, and another system to explain to families. A good rule is to replace rather than accumulate: when you adopt something new, retire something it supersedes.